Yeah, but basic paging statistics do not necessarily indicate anything, at least without further knowledge of how the OS deals with VM.

Some Unices are constantly paging in order to keep the free list up to date, and paging activity merely indicates that memory is being used and released. In other words, perfectly normal activity. Solaris is one such beast. The best indicator under Solaris for more memory is its scanrate value, which indicates how often the kernel goes searching for pages it can swap out A constant high value means that the kernel is constantly swapping active pages in and out of the hard drive. But that's not likely to be an accurate indicator under Darwin, since (1)Darwin is bound to use a vastly different VM system, and (2) Darwin's vm_stat has no scanrate value. In fact, pagein and pageout might be valid indicators of low memory in Darwin, but I doubt it, and I don't have the time or skill to dig through kernel source to figure it out. I need someone to figure it out for me.

I'm at the point where other evidence, though, namely the constant hard drive grinding, points strongly to too little memory.