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High memory useage but no apps running

B

bingefeller

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 25, 2007
618
42
Northern Ireland
Yesterday my computer had been running for 5 days straight and when I looked at the Activity Monitor under "Active" it read 957mb. I wasn't running any apps at the time and was wondering if there was a reason for this? Maybe it's because I hadn't restarted in 5 days?

I also hadn't slept the computer in about 3 days as I'd been downloading quite a lot. I turned it off before I went to bed and everything's fine today, but I'd like to know what caused memory usage to be so high. I should have taken a screenshot of the activity monitor, but I didn't.

I have 2gigs of memory so the computer using so much memory wasn't a problem, but I'm just curious.

If anyone can explain, then that'd be nice.
 
Do you have a lot of widgets? Also, the kernel can use a fair amount of memory at times.

Activity Monitor reports the real and virtual memory usage for all processes right there in the window, so you can see what's active at any given time.
 
WildCowboy said:
Do you have a lot of widgets? Also, the kernel can use a fair amount of memory at times.

Activity Monitor reports the real and virtual memory usage for all processes right there in the window, so you can see what's active at any given time.
Click to expand...

Only two widgets running - iStat and the getGmail widget. I also noticed popupdictdaemon was running, I'm not sure how this came to be running though.
 
Not sure, but if you look in Activity Monitor under All Processes mds might be runnin' out of control...at least that's what it does on my box (sometimes taking over 200MB of RAM). That and kernel_task are usually the culprits for me.

Anyone know if it's safe to kill mds?
 
epochblue said:
Not sure, but if you look in Activity Monitor under All Processes mds might be runnin' out of control...at least that's what it does on my box (sometimes taking over 200MB of RAM). That and kernel_task are usually the culprits for me.

Anyone know if it's safe to kill mds?
Click to expand...

If it should happen again, I'll be sure to take a screenshot and post it here. Probably just needed a restart :)

It's just that I'm kind of worried as the computer's only a matter of weeks old. I'm keeping a close eye on things, should something go wrong, then I can get it fixed or send it back to Apple if need be.
 
epochblue said:
I know what mds is, I was just curious if it's safe to kill the process. I've Googled around, but have yet to find an article that clearly states whether or not it's okay to kill it...
Click to expand...

Yes, you should be able to kill it with no adverse effects. It should restart, but hopefully it'll behave itself.
 
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