What is eating up my Ram?

[furryrabidbunny]

Okay, this is confussing me. I still haven't put that gig stick into my Mac, but still 53.94 mb of free Ram with only Safari (and activity monitor) open just doesn't sound right. Safari itself is eating 75.46 MB of ram with two tabs open (amazon and macrumors). I dont believe either site uses flash, but to solve that problem I took the plunge and installed the intel alpha of the flash plugin. What is killing my performance, or is this normal?

 

[howesey]

Free RAM in OS X is not how much is 'free'. You need to look at Wired and Active to see how much RAM is being used. OS X keeps data in memory to speed things up. So, for example, when you load Safari.app, it stays in memory so if you load it again it reads from faster RAM rather than your HDD. If the memory is needed where Safari.app is stored, it will either sent it to page file or purge it.

As for what is eating it up, on Intel Macs it's usually Rosette.

 

[ChrisA]

Okay, this is confussing me. I still haven't put that gig stick into my Mac, but still 53.94 mb of free Ram with only Safari (and activity monitor) open just doesn't sound right. Safari itself is eating 75.46 MB of ram with two tabs open (amazon and macrumors). I dont believe either site uses flash, but to solve that problem I took the plunge and installed the intel alpha of the flash plugin. What is killing my performance, or is this normal?

I don't see a problem. All modern OSes will use available RAM to cache disk files.

You say something is "killing my performance". Is this true? Is it really running slow?

What you want to try and minimize are the numbers of "page outs" this is where the OS has to swap RAM content to disk. page outs will slow the systemand is a sign that you could use more RAM.