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Sorry for the off-topic question. Why is my Activity Monitor showing 7.75GB instead of 8GB RAM?

SL 10.6.8, MBP 13" Mid-2009.
 

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According to OS X Daily, Lion RAM requirements are 2GB (SL was 1). I'm going to venture that 2GB is the absolute minimum, but at least 4GBs is what's needed to run a cozy system? I know my dad's Mini has problems running SL on 3GB, with apps like Excel in use.

Sorry for the off-topic question. Why is my Activity Monitor showing 7.75GB instead of 8GB RAM?

SL 10.6.8, MBP 13" Mid-2009.

Wait, so you're not even on Lion yet? ;)

From the Apple Menu, hold down the Option key and select System Information, then go to the Memory section under Hardware. Are both of your slots filled with 4GB?

-256MB sure is an odd amount to be missing. 3.75GB RAM sticks don't even exist, do they?
 
Sorry for the off-topic question. Why is my Activity Monitor showing 7.75GB instead of 8GB RAM?

SL 10.6.8, MBP 13" Mid-2009.

2008/2009 unibody models report 8GB o RAM differently. Thank the Nvidia IGP.
 
Seems about the same to Snow Leopard to me. Possibly a bit better but I would need a few weeks of uptime to say for sure.

As for Safari -- it's based on WebKit2 so higher memory usage is to be expected.


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Aloha everyone,

I haven't really seen Safari take up too much RAM, as shown in the accompanying screenshot. I did a double-take of my page outs - only 8.5MB! I was at 0MB for a while, but 8.5MB is too trivial to even bother mentioning. I guess having 8GB of RAM helps out :D
 

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I have 8Gb, and it shows 5Gb Free ... but I always close apps often ... I usually only run iTunes, mail, safari and maybe one other app that I'm using.

My brother was using 1Gb and it felt very slow on startup and laggy during regular usage, so I gave him 2Gb and it seems much more reasonable now. That said, he has nearly no free RAM when doing almost nothing, so I would definitely agree 2Gb is a minimum. 4Gb is pretty cheap and the way to go for sure, but his 2006 macbook is due for an upgrade anyways so I didn't see the point in spending more $$$.
 
I don't mean to stir up the debate but having the system using more ram is a good thing.

I am not sure why you would be obsessed by having tons of unused ram sitting idle when it could be making sure everything ran better.

The more important thing is to look for page outs, which could indicate an insufficient amount of ram installed.
 
I don't mean to stir up the debate but having the system using more ram is a good thing.

I am not sure why you would be obsessed by having tons of unused ram sitting idle when it could be making sure everything ran better.

The more important thing is to look for page outs, which could indicate an insufficient amount of ram installed.


well said.
 
There is this WebProcess that is hogging 700mb on my RAM. I think it's WebKit.. I really don't know.
 
I don't mean to stir up the debate but having the system using more ram is a good thing.

I am not sure why you would be obsessed by having tons of unused ram sitting idle when it could be making sure everything ran better.

The more important thing is to look for page outs, which could indicate an insufficient amount of ram installed.

In theory it's all good, but in real world everything needs to be justified. If you can't justify high RAM consumption then something is wrong.


For example right now Lion uses 1826 MB RAM on my iMac and Snow Leopard uses ~1 GB (since i upgraded my Snow Leopard installation copy to play with it it has all the same settings.) In both cases i'm only in Safari reading MacRumours.

That's almost 2x RAM consumption without benefits.
 
In theory it's all good, but in real world everything needs to be justified. If you can't justify high RAM consumption then something is wrong.


For example right now Lion uses 1826 MB RAM on my iMac and Snow Leopard uses ~1 GB (since i upgraded my Snow Leopard installation copy to play with it it has all the same settings.) In both cases i'm only in Safari reading MacRumours.

That's almost 2x RAM consumption without benefits.

Sure but Lion is fully 64-bit and will use more ram.

Have it in any way affected your usage of the operating system or is it simply because Activity Monitor reports that it is now using more ram compared to Snow Leopard that you think about it? :)
 
Sure but Lion is fully 64-bit and will use more ram.

Have it in any way affected your usage of the operating system or is it simply because Activity Monitor reports that it is now using more ram compared to Snow Leopard that you think about it? :)

That's actually with 32 bit kernel on Lion. I find it more stable and system is a bit faster too.
 
Apple definitely needs to work on the memory consumption. This screenshot is vista sp2 with 1gb of ram on a pentium 4 HT with a ton of tabs open plus wmp and a network share only using 650mb. The system is fast and responsive, and windows 7 is even better in this respect. And vista and windows 7 have a pretty aggressive caching mechanism as well.

 

Running Finder, App Store, iCal, Mail, Address Book, iTunes, Pages, SchoolHouse, Preview, Grab and Activity Monitor. Oh, and Dashboard. Upgrading to 8GB will certainly help things. :D
 
Lion is a lot more RAM hungry and is generally much slower than 10.6, I expect 10.7.1 to resolve some of this since there isn't any real reason for more resource consumption.
 
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