Active memory doesn't go inactive

[Schtibbie]

YES, I am aware of the definitions and supposed behaviors of free mem, active, inactive, wired, when looking at Activity Monitor. I know that Leopard caches stuff, yada yada yada...

BUT.. I just doubled my RAM from 1 to 2 gigs. After a fresh boot and loading up Safari, Firefox, and iPhoto, and then CLOSING all of them and running no apps, Leopard shows more than a gig of ACTIVE memory, which even after sitting there for an hour doing nothing - does NOT go over to the INactive section. Why? I'm not asking why it doesn't go to "free". I know why.


My top command output:
PhysMem: 240M wired, 1006M active, 307M inactive, 1559M used, 489M free.
VM: 5579M + 374M 276396(0) pageins, 61(0) pageouts

 

[ihabime]

It doesn't pass back to inactive because technically it's not, the OS holds it as cache in case you relaunch those apps.

It is still available to be used by other applications if they need it though.

The labels are a bit misleading, they really describe the priority that the OS will use to decide where to grab from, first free then inactive then active. In the case of active memory it might even swap the contents to disk if it contains a currently running app.

 

[ElectricSheep]

BUT.. I just doubled my RAM from 1 to 2 gigs. After a fresh boot and loading up Safari, Firefox, and iPhoto, and then CLOSING all of them and running no apps, Leopard shows more than a gig of ACTIVE memory, which even after sitting there for an hour doing nothing - does NOT go over to the INactive section. Why? I'm not asking why it doesn't go to "free". I know why.

That is because the kernel doesn't actually maintain these lists (in the sense of moving old active pages to the inactive list, and paging inactive objects out to disk) until the number of free physical pages hits a low-water mark.

 

[Schtibbie]

That is because the kernel doesn't actually maintain these lists (in the sense of moving old active pages to the inactive list, and paging inactive objects out to disk) until the number of free physical pages hits a low-water mark.

Ah, makes sense! I guess there's no point shuffling pages around just for fun until it's needed.