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devilstrider

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 12, 2010
658
0
I have a 15in i5 with 8 gigs of ram. I'm using 3.59gig.

5eigqp.jpg
 
How do you free up RAM? You close applications that you have running. Obviously, that's not a desirable solution. In practical use, you don't worry about trying to free up RAM. Mac OS X manages memory quite well, so you don't have to think about it. You're not even using half of the RAM you have. Read the links spinnerlys posted, to gain a better understanding, then forget about it and just use your Mac.
 
You have 8GB of RAM, of which more than 50% is free (4.41GB) and 20% inactive (almost free).
Why do you need to free more RAM? Why did you get the 8GB in the first place then?
And you have no swapping as you can see, which is a good thing.


Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Making The Most of Activity Monitor

I'm going to be running Photoshop and final cut. Also the ram was cheap and I have money to get the ram so I got it while it was a deal.
 
How do you free up RAM? You close applications that you have running. Obviously, that's not a desirable solution. In practical use, you don't worry about trying to free up RAM. Mac OS X manages memory quite well, so you don't have to think about it. You're not even using half of the RAM you have. Read the links spinnerlys posted, to gain a better understanding, then forget about it and just use your Mac.

I only asked because I thought using that much was bad. Just moved over from windows.
 
I only asked because I thought using that much was bad. Just moved over from windows.

Using RAM is never bad, when the page outs (swapping) occur, then it is getting into "bad" territory, as the RAM is being copied onto the HDD. You have more than enough RAM to use FCP and PS.

No worries.


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Minor Problems

6. Sequential posts.
Combine your comments into one post rather than making many consecutive posts to a thread within a short period of time.
 
Using RAM is never bad, when the page outs (swapping) occur, then it is getting into "bad" territory, as the RAM is being copied onto the HDD. You have more than enough RAM to use FCP and PS.

No worries.


Btw, to quote someone, just press the
quote.gif
button. To quote several posts, use the
multiquote_off.gif
button (multi-quote). To edit your posts, use the
edit.gif
button.

All these buttons are on the bottom left of the posts.

Now that's funny.
 
I have a 15in i5 with 8 gigs of ram. I'm using 3.59gig.

5eigqp.jpg

As said above, you don't need to free up that blue section of RAM, the OS will manage it just fine. However, if you want to do so, run the Disk Utility and Repair Permissions, the result will be almost no more blue used RAM. Not that that is going to make your computer run any better, and you lose the time required for the operation, :cool:.
 
As said above, you don't need to free up that blue section of RAM, the OS will manage it just fine. However, if you want to do so, run the Disk Utility and Repair Permissions, the result will be almost no more blue used RAM. Not that that is going to make your computer run any better, and you lose the time required for the operation, :cool:.

I feel you.
 
As said above, you don't need to free up that blue section of RAM, the OS will manage it just fine. However, if you want to do so, run the Disk Utility and Repair Permissions, the result will be almost no more blue used RAM. Not that that is going to make your computer run any better, and you lose the time required for the operation, :cool:.

Where do you get that from? Repair Permissions had essentially no effect on my inactive RAM, but it consumed quite a bit of Active RAM while it was running.

Inactive RAM is things like programs you recently closed, which are kept in memory so they start faster next time. Try starting a big application after a fresh boot, then quitting and starting it again. It should start much faster the second time. When something else needs that memory, the OS should free it up, the result being a faster computer.

I've had some issues with inactive RAM, though. Specifically, it doesn't always seem to get freed up when it should based on Apple's definition. Instead it often gets swapped out, which is slow and pointless. With 8gb, you shouldn't need to worry about this much, though. I have 6gb and it is only rarely a problem.
 
If you are hellbent on seeing the Inactive memory usage as low as possible, open Terminal and type in "purge". (You may need to have Xcode/Developer Tools installed first)
 
reboot your computer then look at how much ram is free. It should be less because when you turn on and off your computer the ram is erased and any processes not necessary anymore will be forced to quit.
 
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