13'' MBP low on RAM?? wierd...

[iag48]

Ladies and Gents,

I have a little problem. Recently my mbp has been getting the beach a lot. I started monitoring the ram usage and it appears I'm maxing out. However I don't use or have many applications running. As you can see from the desktop screen shot, I usually just have safari, itunes and mail open. I never had ram issues on my black 2.0ghz with 2GB of Ram.
I have been resorting to rebooting the mbp every day but the ram some how appears to get used up.
It was not like this when I first bought it. Do you think that downloading torrents is causing the Page Out to increase? It is almost even with Page Ins.
I can always buy more ram but I want to know what has been causing this increase usage of Ram.
thanks.

 

[iag48]

Bump?

 

[m85476585]

Set the dropdown at the top to show all processes, and sort by RAM.

Please don't bump threads. It's against the forum rules. Be patient, and someone will eventually find the thread.

 

[Dwalls90]

A) Leopard/Snow Leopard will eat up 2Gb under pretty basic usage, so 2Gb isn't necessarily a large amount.

B) It looks like you're torrenting - not sure about all clients, but Transmission is notorious for eating up RAM as transfers continue.

C) If you're experiencing severe beach-ball delays, I would attribute that to your HDD, not RAM.

 

[m85476585]

It could be that Transmission used a lot of RAM recently, but isn't any more. OS X might not be freeing up that RAM, for some reason. This seems to be a problem with OS X; RAM that is no longer needed is kept around, and instead of dropping it when something else calls for RAM, it swaps it out. Stuff in inactive RAM is the worst, since that usually consists of recently closed programs that are kept in RAM so they start faster. Although it looks like you have too much Active RAM used, which might or might not be similar.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342

Beachballing will happen if you are out of RAM, and something needs more RAM. Data in RAM has to be moved to the hard drive (although here's where inactive RAM should be dropped).

Try a different bittorrent client, like utorrent.

OS X really does work best with 4GB of RAM.

 

[iag48]

Thanks guys. I did not know about the bumping.

Now that I think of it, it may be Transmission. This all started once I switched from Frostwire to Transmission to handle torrents. I'm going to try uTorrent.

 

[silverite]

I think that may be normal in terms of usage. This mac is maybe just a few weeks old. And I only do light usage on it. And currently just browsing the web and being logged in msn shows that 1.88 Gb of ram is being used.