freeing memory...

[skate71290]

I'm no genius so be nice

Hey everyone, just thought i would chime in on this lively debate and honestly, something i found when using my signature laptop, instead of upgrading from 4GB to 8GB i decided to upgrade my HDD to an SSD, and for some reason i had much less stalls in my programs and what not (considering i'm a powerhouse multi-tasker) and many of Apple's Native Apps have become such memory-hogs (i'm looking at Safari and iTunes Beta 10.5) but i don't know what it is, but when i'm very low on RAM (high Active and Inactive), i rarely notice any sluggishness, plus encoding, downloading, and iTunes access times are considerably higher (i know this is, i think, due to much faster read and write from the SSD)... try upgrading to an SSD lol, best thing i did to my laptop

 

[derbothaus]

derbothaus:

If the kernel manages it efficiently, why does it keep so much inactive when page ins/outs reach obscene levels? At some point, it's a better tradeoff to clear the inactive memory and give it to new apps/processes, instead of reserving it for recently closed things. While keeping some reserved in case you open a closed app/file again is good, doing it as aggressively as OS X does clearly isn't.

I said efficiently not always effectively. I know what you are saying when it gets real low on available. It'll only page out a few more MB to disk at a time when realistically you could recoup 1GB or more of inactive. Somewhere there is a trade off to the hit your HDD and resulting interaction penalty to perceived speed is but I do not know where and why Apple drew that line where it is. I have a feeling when SSD's become more the norm larger chunks could be cleared.
Please do not get the idea that I am necessarily a fan of where we are at today. All OS's are struggling with this issue. In the article it talks more about the changes and implications of new tech API's like ARC.
The kernel is not always called upon to clear old memory from bad, leaky, or anciently crafted software. You have to write in that interaction to your app. Even Apples own SW does not do this wonderfully. They don't always lead by example.
And they've always assumed users have an endless supply of memory even though they ship their product with bare minimum.

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...i decided to upgrade my HDD to an SSD, and for some reason i had much less stalls in my programs and what not...

For some reason