VM_STAT(1) General Commands Manual VM_STAT(1)

vm_statshow Mach virtual memory statistics

vm_stat [[-c count] interval]

vm_stat displays Mach virtual memory statistics. meminfo(1) is the modern, preferred tool for inspecting physical memory usage and should be used instead of vm_stat where possible. If the optional interval is specified, then vm_stat will display the statistics every interval seconds. In this case, each line of output displays the change in each statistic (an interval count of 1 displays the values per second). However, the first line of output following each banner displays the system-wide totals for each statistic. If a count is provided, the command will terminate after count intervals. The following values are displayed:

Pages free
the total number of free pages in the system.
Pages active
the total number of pages currently in use and pageable.
Pages inactive
the total number of pages on the inactive list.
Pages speculative
the total number of pages on the speculative list.
Pages throttled
the total number of pages on the throttled list (not wired but not pageable). These are also included in Pages wired down below.
Pages wired down
the total number of pages wired down. That is, pages that cannot be paged out.
Pages purgeable
the total number of purgeable pages.
Translation faults
the number of times the "vm_fault" routine has been called.
Pages copy-on-write
the number of faults that caused a page to be copied (generally caused by copy-on-write faults).
Pages zero filled
the total number of pages that have been zero-filled on demand.
Pages reactivated
the total number of pages that have been moved to the active list, e.g. from the inactive list or when a page is unwired.
Pages purged
the total number of pages that have been purged.
File-backed pages
the total number of resident pages that are file-backed, excluding those that are wired down. File-backed pages can be evicted and refetched under pressure and do not need to be compressed.
Anonymous pages
the total number of resident pages that are anonymous, that is, not file-backed. Anonymous pages may be compressed under pressure. Does not include pages stored in the compressor (and so not resident) or that are wired down.
Pages stored in compressor
the total number of pages whose contents are stored in the in-memory compressor pool.
Pages occupied by compressor
the total number of pages used by the in-memory compressor pool.
Decompressions
the total number of pages that have been decompressed by the VM compressor.
Compressions
the total number of pages that have been compressed by the VM compressor.
Pageins
the total number of requests for pages from a pager (such as the inode pager). This may include speculative reads.
Pageouts
the total number of file-backed pages that have been written back to a pager.
Swapins
the amount of compressed data read back in from swap files, in units of pages. Because the data is compressed, this is not the number of pages it expands to.
Swapouts
the amount of compressed data written out to swap files, in units of pages. Likewise, this is not the number of pages that were compressed to produce it.

Both swap counters also include I/O used for swapfile maintenance.

If the system supports the ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), then the following values will additionally be displayed:

Pages tagged
the total number of virtual pages which have been assigned memory tags.
Pages tagged resident
the number of tagged pages which are resident in memory.
Pages tagged compressed
the number of tagged pages which have been evicted to the compressor.
Pages tag-storage
the total number of physical pages which may be used to store memory tags.
Pages tag-storage holding tags
the number of physical pages which are currently being used to store memory tags.
Pages tag-storage free
the number of tag-storage pages which are unused. These are also included in Pages free above.
Pages tag-storage non-tag pageable
the number of tag-storage pages which are being used to store pageable non-tag data.
Pages tag-storage non-tag wired
the number of tag-storage pages which are being used to store wired non-tag data.
Bytes of compressed tags
the (post-compression) size of memory tags currently held in the compressor, in bytes.
Tagged compressions
the number of tagged pages which have been compressed.
Tagged decompressions
the number of tagged pages which have been decompressed.

If interval is not specified, then vm_stat displays all accumulated statistics along with the page size.

footprint(1), meminfo(1), top(1), zprint(1)

August 13, 1997 macOS