isnt beachball means please wait?
Yes, waiting for ?
Throughout my experience with Mac OS X, beach balls happens quite often in the first few iterations of the OS, but really seldom or even occur to me anymore since Snow Leopard. I can't remember when is the last time I observed the beach ball of death(really, it's like it has never exists since years ago). One thing is I moved on to SSD, another is I have a pretty powerful MBP.
However there are various reasons why the beach ball of death does occur. It could be hard disk related, network related(especially DNS resolution), a rouge runaway application causing processor hogging or deadlock in some cases. Memory cases while possible is seldom.
But I don't really see it as a good indication of memory issue, though it does indicate there is a bottleneck or issue somewhere. Before you start blaming every spin ball you see as memory related, you must understand that changing the way how memory is handle is a global effect on the system. It could be one of the subsystem not utilising the memory properly causing memory leakage which in turn cause large amount paging in the end. Then it's not the memory subsystem at fault. Your FreeMemory pick up the issue and purge away the leakage, but the main issue is with the software you are using, not with the memory subsystem.
If your system is a long running server where user intervention is not possible, then basically FreeMemory didn't do much except that you explicitly initiate a memory sweep. It is not at all an indication that it's doing a better job than the kernel, it is you an extra handle to manually sweep the memory. In the end, instead of have an automated system, you end up as part of the system doing manual jobs.
