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rMBP using more ram than Windows?

H

hannan8v8

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 1, 2014
18
0
Hey, I have a doubt regarding macbook. I purchased a rMBP 13" mid-2014 version with 8 gb ram. My brother has a HP Pavilion notebook with 8Gb ram as well.

Right now as I am typing this, my macbook has 5.4gb memory used up as it shows on the activity monitor. I have only Safari open with 3 tabs, thats it. All the other programs are closed. My brothers windows 8 uses up only 2.5-3gb memory with similar activity. Is this normal? Do Macs use more ram than windows laptops?

Stuff I do usually do with my macbook: watch movies and browse. I don't use it heavily at all. Activity monitor never showed the CPU usage over 15%.
 
simonsi

simonsi

Contributor
Jan 3, 2014
4,851
735
Auckland
Your Mac is fine, working normally and making better use of its RAM than the Win machine. Your Mac will keep closed app in memory in case you want to use them again for instance, making the reload much quicker. If the OS needs more memory it will discard closed apps it has not re-used.

To check, look in the Activity Monitor, memory tab. If the RAM pressure graph is Green then you have nothing to worry about.
 
maflynn

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,488
43,411
Memory management on OS X is completely different then windows. In OS X and Unix, free memory is wasted memory. Its not a bad thing to see most of you memory get used. What is bad is the swap in/swap outs. That's the stuff that is getting swapped in and out from disk.

In Windows, using up all your ram, can affect system performance and/or stability.

Still its an apples and oranges type of comparison.
 
H

hannan8v8

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 1, 2014
18
0
simonsi said:
Your Mac is fine, working normally and making better use of its RAM than the Win machine. Your Mac will keep closed app in memory in case you want to use them again for instance, making the reload much quicker. If the OS needs more memory it will discard closed apps it has not re-used.

To check, look in the Activity Monitor, memory tab. If the RAM pressure graph is Green then you have nothing to worry about.
Click to expand...

So the green means safe in the activity monitor. What other colors are there? When should I start worrying?

sorry for the noob questions, just new to mac.
 
S

Samuelsan2001

macrumors 604
Oct 24, 2013
7,729
2,153
Green is safe

It will show yellow, then red, traffic light warning system. Don't worry though you will need to be running a hell of a lot or some very intense programs to get to this stage.


The current operating systems (mavericks and yosemite) also use a RAM compression system and reports of people with 8gb of RAM having 12gb worth of RAM usage going and remaining in green are not uncommon.
 
H

hannan8v8

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 1, 2014
18
0
simonsi said:
Your Mac is fine, working normally and making better use of its RAM than the Win machine. Your Mac will keep closed app in memory in case you want to use them again for instance, making the reload much quicker. If the OS needs more memory it will discard closed apps it has not re-used.

To check, look in the Activity Monitor, memory tab. If the RAM pressure graph is Green then you have nothing to worry about.
Click to expand...

Thanks guys, really appreciate it.
 
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