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Veradun

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 19, 2013
42
0
Sydney, Australia
No. Enjoy your computer!

I already am :D this laptop just screams. It boots up in 6-8 seconds, no exaggeration. I've never used such a snappy computer before...but I've yet to put it through its paces. Time to install Adobe CS6...

Those types of programs are a waste. Inactive memory is a good thing, especially when you have an excess amount of RAM on board.

For example, think of this: you reboot your computer, and then open iTunes. iTunes is read from your hard drive and loaded into the RAM - this process takes the longest time, since accessing the hard drive is sluggish. Now you quit iTunes. Because you have a lot of RAM the system will leave parts of iTunes there, and mark it as "inactive." Later you open iTunes again. The parts of iTunes that are inactive now become active, and your computer has that much less to transfer from the hard drive to the RAM. A SSD will speed up the process of transferring data into the RAM, but the overall idea is the same: why do you want to purge things from the RAM that you might soon be putting back into it?

If you have a low amount of RAM and disk space I might see the utility of so-called RAM cleaners. You would lose some performance by purging the RAM but you would be avoiding the possibility of growing a swap file. For someone with 8+ GB of RAM it's a total waste. The operating system is designed to handle the inactive RAM and clear it if an active process needs more.

I have 16 GB of RAM, and right now I have 5 GB active and 7 GB inactive. The only wasted RAM is the 4 GB that is currently free, because it isn't being used for anything and it won't speed up any program loading or program processes.

Thanks for clarifying RAM usage for me, it's much appreciated! :) I tried using those kind of apps on my old laptop. Didn't seem to do anything. If anything, the laptop actually performed more sluggishly :confused: coming from a Windows system I was with the mindset that regular system maintenance was needed for Mac OS. But it seems I was mistaken.

I'm surprised that the memory usage is that high. I use less with more programs running but I don't use Chrome so I don't know about its memory usage.

There's nothing you need to do. Main measurement in activity monitor to check is Page Outs. With 16gb I doubt that it will get off 0, which is good.

I was surprised too. Shut my laptop off last night and it was using 9GB of RAM, with 4GB inactive. I'm under the impression that Mac OS detects the 16GB of RAM and uses it accordingly - meaning, the same apps use more RAM just because there IS more. So if I got 8GB instead, it wouldn't be using as much. It's probably just how Mountain Lion allocates resources. I kinda miss Snow Leopard though - using just 500MB for the OS :rolleyes:

Right now, booting from a cold start - 2GB of RAM used. Inactive doesn't seem to be growing :)
 
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