8GB Ram Macbook Pro Problem

[Brandonicholas]

Hello Macrumors! I have a Mid 2012 15" Macbook Pro that is running 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 and 4GB 1600 MHz DD3 RAM with 500GB HDD, and just yesterday i upgraded it to 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3 Corsair Vengeance and to 1TB WD SATA8, but just really curious on ram usage, i have no application opened, but its only giving me top free ram about 5,5ish. I'm curious does the Mavericks it self, eat a lot RAM itself, or is it because of my Time Machine backup? FYI: I restore my Macbook Pro from a Time Machine backup, will setting this MBP as a new laptop by dragging my files without restoring Time Machine backup fix this problem?

PS: I have Windows 7 in Bootcamp, and it shows 7.5GB free space of RAM, with no application open, which sounds great! But not with Mavericks in this case.

Thanks

(Application opened are the background application such as Dropbox)

 

[Meister]

You are misenterpreting the activity monitor.
Your ram pressure is super low as you can see in the right bottom corner of you screenshot.
Please dont obsess about the activity monitor.

 

[Macman45]

Perfectly normal, and you've obviously installed it correctly or it wouldn't show up. Just use it. I took my cMBP up to 16GB before selling it for my current rMBP....I only noticed a big hit in certain apps....Aperture, Logic etc.

 

[simonsi]

Mavericks keeps your RAM ready for what you might want to do - it doesn't immediately flush closed apps from memory in case you want to reopen it, unless you need the RAM freed for something else.

Windows obviously can't think of anything useful to do with it....empty RAM is somewhat like empty cache....wasted.

 

[simon48]

The other posters are right, you're doing just fine. Also some RAM goes to the OS as it always needs RAM to function.

 

[yjchua95]

The more RAM you have, the more RAM the OS will try to use to keep everything smooth.

That said, you shouldn't worry unless the memory pressure is red and you're paging out memory like hell.

 

[maflynn]

In OSX (and unix), free ram is wasted ram. In windows, I'd agree things would look rather poorly but in OSX that's not the case. You'd need to how your swap file is being used, i.e., memory page outs and page ins. That will tell you whether OSX is running low on resources.

 

[Brandonicholas]

Thank you for everybody's replies, i did a fresh install of my Mac, and the RAM usage was still the same, so now i understand that Mac takes advantage of free RAM whilst not being used, thanks for the feedbacks!