Where is my memory?

Heres the deal:
Why is it that if you look at OSX 10.4 (activity monitor), it uses about 100MB RAM idling, but then move over to snow leopard on another machine, and i have 800MB being used idling... why is this? there is not really much going on with the new system that the old system didn't already do. this is ridiculous, and call me crazy, but it seems like the latest software is purposely slow to get you to buy new hardware.

my iPhone 4 was screaming fast on iOS 4, and now that i upgraded to iOS 5 everything lags and is no fun. why?? i am not hallucinating, and they really could not have changed the iPod app enough that it would start to hang for 10 seconds at a time under iOS 5 while before in iOS 4 it was smooth and never had a slowdown at all.

i mean come on, at the time the iPhone 4 was top dog it was the smoothest out there but suddenly a faster iPhone and a new iOS comes out and the iPhone 4 is slow as crap with the upgrade!

can anyone explain the major upgrade slowdowns that are so common, yet seem to have no obvious cause?

what do you guys think? planned obsolescence? something i am missing?

wrldwzrd89 said:

Why are you worrying over Mac OS X's memory management in the first place? Yes, it is normal for the RAM in use to change over time, and with OS upgrades/updates... but does it really matter, as long as you can still run your application load at normal speed for your hardware? In my opinion, it does not.

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that is the problem, my system is getting very slow even after plenty of disc permission repairs and memory upgrades and even a hard drive upgrade. this is a $1300 machine were talking about here.

wrldwzrd89 said:

Right. Gotcha. Check your Page Ins/Page Outs ratio while the Mac is under normal load, and when idle. This can be done easily with Activity Monitor. The general guideline is this: If your page in to page out ratio is 1:4 or less, you are frequently overextending your physical RAM, and more would help. If that does not identify an obvious problem, then the next thing to look at is your Console logs. (Hint: do a search for "hang") The logs are usually informative, to varying degrees, as to what's going on.

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sorry to sound like an ass for a second there...anyway:

i have 62,000 page ins and 0 page outs... i guess i just restarted a minute ago so maybe look again later? is that a bad ratio?

okay thanks for the help guys, turns out this whole deal was a problem with an "invalid node error" or something in the disc utility. I restored from a time machine backup and now the computer works like new again! Problems are all gone.