Understanding active, inactive, free and swap memory allocation
Wired memory is memory that the Operating System has reserved for itself, and it cannot be written to disk.

VM Memory is the amount of space on your disk that the system has allocated for virtual memory. This is slow, and one of the main reasons why running low of free RAM will bring your system to a crawl.

Page ins / outs are when RAM memory is written to the disk (out) and when it is copied back from the disk into RAM (in).

Swap is how much of the VM Memory the system is actually using.

This, and more, can also be found here: http://www.interrupt19.com/2009/06/15/os-x-memory-usage-explained/ and here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342?viewlocale=en_US&amp;locale=en_US

Make sure you have enough free space on your disk for the OS to swap as needed. A good rule of thumb is that 10% of your total disk capacity should always be free. Furthermore, have you noticed any particular apps giving you trouble? Those tools you're using can be powerful for narrowing down what is causing your problem. Also, if you are running Chrome and Safari simultaneously, I suggest you only run them one at a time, as they both tend to be memory-hungry in my experience.