Here's a weird memory issue...

[Seanb23]

Lately, when I check my Powerbook's Activity Monitor, the slice of the "memory pie" that is taken just gets larger and larger...

I bought a 512 upgrade from Crucial a while back...the memory stick itself works just fine, no problems, it seems...but I've started to notice more and more of the "pie" marked as used. When I run complex audio programs that really strain my Pbook's somewhat anemic 1ghz proc, the memory drain accelerates...nearing most of the "pie" on the Activity Monitor...and noticeably affecting cpu useage.

When I restart the computer, it's back to square one, and a huge chunk of unused memory. So I just restart it once a day or so. This is very strange, and very un-"Mac"-like...

Any of you tech types out there who know the innards of Mac interaction with RAM have any idea what's going on here ?

Thanx in advance...

 

[yellow]

It depends on what is using the memory. What does Activity Monitor say is the biggest eater of RAM? There could be a poorly written app with a memory leak.

 

[iMeowbot]

That's really pretty normal. If you have apps open and there is enough free RAM, code and data tend to sit there doing nothing, since they're not really in anyone's way. If something else comes along and needs the space, the idle stuff will get paged out to disk (or released if it's something the OS cached).

Having more stuff in RAM won't really make your CPU busier, except in the sense that if it used to be starved for RAM and did a lot of waiting for memory to be paged in from the disk, it won't have to wait as much now.

 

[yellow]

Ah, are we talking "inactive" versus "free" memory here?

 

[iMeowbot]

That's what I'd be expecting. Inactive gets counted toward the "used" pile, so appearances can be deceptive.

Also, the Activity Monitor itself eats a bit of CPU itself, it will show up as pmTool in the process list.

 

[yellow]

Further info on "free" versus "inactive"

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=27702