iStat tells me I've got over 159MB of inactive RAM?

[BurtonCCC]

Can somebody explain what this is telling me? I just got concerned when it said I only had 38MB of free RAM. And at one point, the inactive was up around 244MB. The fact that the bar for inactive is red also concerned me because red is the universal color for "Holy crap, help!"

Daniel.

[Queso]

Under OSX Inactive RAM gets reused, so just add that total to your Free RAM to get how much you really have available. Certainly nothing to worry about, even with their colour choice.

[WildCowboy]

Yep...my inactive is at 550 MB, while my free is at 32 MB. Nothing to worry about...normal operation. Good summary available here (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918).

[BurtonCCC]

Thanks a bunch. Can anybody explain to me exactly what each of those words mean? I'm not real clear on "Swap" especially.

Daniel.

[yellow]

swap == hard drive space used as RAM. (sort of)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

[FireArse]

Can I just say that I take the results from iStat with a pinch of salt. I was encoding H.264 for my iPod from a DVD rip and CPU was over just 60% through iStat.

I thought this was very low, and checked out Activity Monitor which returned a value around 190%. Much more reasonable. I then went into 'Terminal' and typed 'top', whose results matched Activity Monitor. Since then, I've stopped relying on iStat.

FYI I have a Rev. B Dual 2GHz G5 with 2.5GB of RAM

FireArse