Absolutely!
- Double Click “Macintosh HD”
- Double Click “Applications”
- Double Click “Utilities”
- Double Click “Terminal.app”
- You’ll probably see a window with something like this:
beast:~ whschultz$
–with a cursor blinking to the right of the $. Type “vm_stat 15” without the quotes, so it looks like this:
beast:~ whschultz$ vm_stat 15
And then press return. You’ll see something like the following:
beast:~ whschultz$ vm_stat 15
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes, cache hits 24%)
free active inac wire faults copy zerofill reactive pageins pageout
266166 189914 436118 157269 550877453 35394959 232029769 1130214 1180555 64980
265817 190133 436468 157049 9308 2 7165 0 0 0
263679 190122 438617 157049 11027 1 9026 0 0 0
A new line will be spit out every fifteen seconds until you stop it (close the window, quit terminal, something like that). The last column is pageout. This is what you want to look at. 1 pageout is only 4KB, which is nothing to worry about. 1000 is 4MB, which is something to notice. 100000 is 400MB, which is a LOT. Note that the very first line after the column names is the number since booting up the computer. Ignore this line. Optimally, the last column will be full of zeroes, but you have to have a lot of RAM for this to happen (I have 4GB, and it’s usually all zeroes, but not guaranteed). Basically, if you have a bunch of big (greater than 1000) numbers in the last column when you run a SuperLab experiment, you might want to think about getting more RAM. There’s no hard rule here. It’s a bit subjective.
I hope this helps!