OS X Steam uses ALL the RAM

It's only using 200MB of RAM. You have a lot of inactive memory though. That should be treated as free RAM.

FigmentNewtonII said:

So why does the amount of inactive RAM shoot skyward every time Steam is open?

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Some program allocate and use a lot of memory initially then release it right away hence inactive memory. Regardless, I don't think you should worry about it.

FigmentNewtonII said:

So shouldn't the amount of inactive RAM go way as soon as Steam is closed out?

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No.

When I have a lot of inactive memory I open up terminal and type "purge". I'm pretty sure it just frees up all the inactive memory. I don't know if there are any long time effects using that command though.

Use it at your own risk.

What games & programs did you quit before checking for inactive memory?

If you are that worried, there is an app on the Mac App Store called memory booster that you can set to free up memory. I run it and I have set it to try and help when it gets to 25mb free (I have 10GB) but it isn't really neccesary and I had 10.9 beta on my machine and I opened 10GB of virtual machines and my Mac ran totally fine thanks to the compressed memory of Mavericks

Blue/inactive memory will/should be freed up if something requests more memory

I think people fixate on this stuff way too much. The system is designed to regulate itself without manual intervention with utility programs.

Unless you observe some marked reduction in performance, I see no reason to even look at memory allocations. Who cares what app is using what so long as the system is humming along fine.

If you can fire up and enjoy a game without feeling that something is wrong, why go looking for troubles?

This reminds me of how people feel a need to check FPS in games often. They need some numerical assurance that all is well it seems. Personally, I go by my perception of how the game is performing and would only look at FPS if performance was poor and I wanted some quick help gauging the impact of various settings changes I might make to correct it before doing another play test, etc.

For a moment here I thought the old bug where Steam would slowly consume all available system memory was back but I can see above that isn't the case fortunately. This was a real problem some time ago but it's long since been fixed. Actually, Steam wouldn't consume all system memory now that I think about it. It would consume about 4 gigs and then crash.

Dirtyharry50 said:

This reminds me of how people feel a need to check FPS in games often. They need some numerical assurance that all is well it seems. Personally, I go by my perception of how the game is performing and would only look at FPS if performance was poor and I wanted some quick help gauging the impact of various settings changes I might make to correct it before doing another play test, etc.

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This is so very true, years back I know of a game that was super popular on PC (and later on Mac) that actually cheated on the in game fps counter to stop the complaints over performance. It basically had this line in the code for the public fps counter!

fps = fps * 2

Funny thing is NOBODY ever called them on that Perception is everything

Dirtyharry50 said:

It would consume about 4 gigs and then crash.

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Steam is a 32bit application, it cannot ever use more memory than the 32bit memory limit which is ~4GB. It crashed as it just ran out of memory allocation space!

edddeduck said:

This is so very true, years back I know of a game that was super popular on PC (and later on Mac) that actually cheated on the in game fps counter to stop the complaints over performance. It basically had this line in the code for the public fps counter!

fps = fps * 2

Funny thing is NOBODY ever called them on that Perception is everything



Steam is a 32bit application, it cannot ever use more memory than the 32bit memory limit which is ~4GB. It crashed as it just ran out of memory allocation space!

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That's a riot! Too funny. It should have dawned on me about Steam being 32bit, etc. No wonder! Thankfully, it is working like a charm ever since they fixed that issue.