Crazy RAM usage in Activity Monitor?!

[Rokusaburo]

Hey guys,

Here's a screenshot of my activity monitor showing 1.29 of 2 GB of RAM being used (including wired and active memory), with hardly anything running.

Is this normal? When I restart my Mac Pro, it shows about 130MB used each for wired and active, but after a while, it begins to pile up.

Also, in the screenshot, it shows 1.29GB being used, but nowhere near this much is shows in the processes.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks guys.

http://att.macrumors.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=89311&stc=1&d=1193662638

 

[irishgrizzly]

Unless your system is running slower than you expect it's nothing to loss hair over. Recent apps will sit in your RAM in case they are needed again in a hurry – it's a good thing.

 

[Grimace]

Can you show us what is going on further down?

 

[Einherjar]

Unless your system is running slower than you expect it's nothing to loss hair over. Recent apps will sit in your RAM in case they are needed again in a hurry – it's a good thing.

This. Don't worry too much about it. OS X always uses more memory than it needs. My MP with 2GB RAM often sits with only perhaps 700MB free at startup, with only SMCFanControl and iChat set to launch.

OS X's a RAM hog like Vista, but unlike Vista you won't notice it until you're really swapping like crazy and really maxing out your available CPU. What OS X loses in Mach's terrible latency is more than gained with good (albeit piggish) resource management and the benefits of Quartz offloading a lot to the GPU.