2009 Macbook Pro HIGH memory usage?

[SoCalMatt]

Recently, my Macbook Pro has been experiencing a HIGH usage of memory and has been freezing. Below is my Macbook Pro's specifications & 1st page of Activity Monitor Usage.

 

[chrfr]

Recently, my Macbook Pro has been experiencing a HIGH usage of memory and has been freezing. Below is my Macbook Pro's specifications & 1st page of Activity Monitor Usage.

You have 3.7GB of cache there. Nothing looks abnormal from the memory usage perspective. That cache will be released as applications need it.
What I would investigate is the Spotify Helper that's hung up. What do you see under CPU usage?

 

[GhettoMrBob]

I honestly wouldn't even worry about it. You aren't hitting your 8GBs that you have installed and even then, Mavericks will resort to compression before it starts paging. Seeing as how your compression and page usage are 0, I wouldn't worry.

As for Spotify, is it even open? A lot of times it will run in the background and use up unnecessary CPU and RAM resources (albeit rather small %). It's located under Spotify Preferences -> Allow Spotify to be opened from the web.

 

[SoCalMatt]

You have 3.7GB of cache there. Nothing looks abnormal from the memory usage perspective. That cache will be released as applications need it.
What I would investigate is the Spotify Helper that's hung up. What do you see under CPU usage?

My CPU has >80% idle so no issue there. Any idea what could cause my computer to be freezing when browsing the web. I tend to have Spotify, Chrome (5-8 tabs) and microsoft office open all at once.

 

[DRob]

kernel_task was slowing down my sister's computer a few months back. This is what fixed it for me. Credit goes to someone else from some other site.

"1. Go to About this mac under the apple in the upper left and click on More info
2. Click on system report
3. make a note of what it says after Model Identifier
4. go to your master drive – System -Library – Extensions – IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext -Contents – Plugins – ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin.kext – Contents – Resources – find the name from step 3 and move it to a folder that you can find again if needed.
3. Restart and you’re done"

 

[simonsi]

My CPU has >80% idle so no issue there. Any idea what could cause my computer to be freezing when browsing the web. I tend to have Spotify, Chrome (5-8 tabs) and microsoft office open all at once.

Probably Chrome....

 

[chrfr]

kernel_task was slowing down my sister's computer a few months back. This is what fixed it for me. Credit goes to someone else from some other site.

"1. Go to About this mac under the apple in the upper left and click on More info
2. Click on system report
3. make a note of what it says after Model Identifier
4. go to your master drive – System -Library – Extensions – IOPlatformPluginFamily.kext -Contents – Plugins – ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin.kext – Contents – Resources – find the name from step 3 and move it to a folder that you can find again if needed.
3. Restart and you’re done"

Blindly removing system files is simply a bad idea.

 

[Altemose]

You have 3.7GB of cache there. Nothing looks abnormal from the memory usage perspective. That cache will be released as applications need it.
What I would investigate is the Spotify Helper that's hung up. What do you see under CPU usage?

For some reason Spotify helper always appears to not be responding on my machine. I am running Mavericks 10.9.3 and though it appears to be not responding Spotify itself works fine.