Weird RAM problem...

aoitsukinosuke said:

Mr. Retrofire - They are for the ML sidebar which idiotically replaces the personalized folder icons with its dull grey ones. Are you inquiring or suggesting that I remove it?

ML clean installation is way over my head, but Firefox is doable. I already did a clean install a few weeks ago. Would you still recommend another one?

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Only on a USB or FireWire disk, so that you do not delete your main installation. The thing is, if your problems disappear with a clean installation (no third party software), then your problem is probably one of the third party applications/extensions/GUI-modifications and so on. In some cases the deinstallation of “questionable” components and a restart help.

Michaelgtrusa said:

Slowing down again? how many apps did you install?

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I don't think its the apps in general, it's just not as quite as quick to startup, but I expected it being that a bare bones system has almost no startup apps. I also have my mail open automatically as to tell me how much mail I have as it doesn't work with notification center if its closed. If I wren't using Photoshop and Lightroom I probably wouldn't have any use for more RAM anyway. 12GB would be plenty and/or more than enough for any average user. But as OS X gets more and more RAM intensive its hard to say if even 12GB would be enough in the next few years.

aoitsukinosuke said:

This morning, my Mac was a little slow so I checked the monitor.
Free was 87MB, Inactive 4.2GB and for the first time since RAM upgrade there was 6MB Page outs.

Then, I only closed Venna Feeder app which was only using 230MB and suddenly the free RAM shoots upto 3GB.

Can anyone explain this to me?

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Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

aoitsukinosuke said:

Thanks for yr quick reply, but I wasn't after the page out issue.
I am merely trying to figure out how can 3gb RAM be released by closing a simple rss app that uses less than 300mb?

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There are other things that could have been using that RAM, including the OS.