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How do you clear inactive ram?

Chase R said:
I believe what is happening is that an app is chewing so much memory (this is the fault of the app developers), that it is paging out the memory that was once occupied by the system... Thus resulting in a slow laggy system when it has to page back in the memory from the HDD.

VLC does this with larger files (if you don't turn off "file memory mapping").

Vuze does this too... Horrible memory management.

I believe iVolume fixed this issue that it once had.

Transmission has become a little better with memory management, it is still catching quite a bit though.
Click to expand...

Do you know if Plex has a similar effect to VLC in this regard? My 8gb ram i5 iMac frequently hits 40mb free ram with often up to 4-5gb in inactive. It gets very sluggish and is obviously having difficulty freeing up inactive ram however I am not sure what the root cause of this is.

http://www.icoretech.org/2011/07/how-to-recover-memory-on-mac-os-x-lion-for-free/

This suggests a way to auto purge after a preset amount of time, but it feels like a workaround for a problem that should perhaps not exist. Also watching movies with the 'purge' freeze every so often isn't a pleasant experience.
 
rversteegh said:
Do you know if Plex has a similar effect to VLC in this regard? My 8gb ram i5 iMac frequently hits 40mb free ram with often up to 4-5gb in inactive. It gets very sluggish and is obviously having difficulty freeing up inactive ram however I am not sure what the root cause of this is.

http://www.icoretech.org/2011/07/how-to-recover-memory-on-mac-os-x-lion-for-free/

This suggests a way to auto purge after a preset amount of time, but it feels like a workaround for a problem that should perhaps not exist. Also watching movies with the 'purge' freeze every so often isn't a pleasant experience.
Click to expand...
From my experience, Plex does like to use up every bit of available memory when watching a movie. It appears to fill memory as a buffer for playback. And it is rather slow to give it back, generally in excess of 15-30 minutes after you stop watching. Quitting plea generally releases the memory in about a minute. However, it does release it eventually.
 
all ya got to do to get rid of inactive ram is install ifreemem, it closes inactive ram portion in memory and replaces it with free memory.

easy! 🙄
 
go to the app store and download FreeMemory... a free app, which is ranked #7 in free apps.

I only use this when running huge RAM sucking games.
 
Apple needs to make it easy for developers (heck, maybe they do) to disable apps from catching certain data. Yes, catching the program itself is very useful, but catching every bit of a 1080p movie is useless.

Transmission used to have this problem, but the devs figured out a fix for it. Vuze still catches every bit of data it reads and eventually turns your Mac into a turtle. VLC, Plex, and Handbrake seem to have the same issue as well.
 
Chase R said:
Transmission used to have this problem, but the devs figured out a fix for it. Vuze still catches every bit of data it reads and eventually turns your Mac into a turtle. VLC, Plex, and Handbrake seem to have the same issue as well.
Click to expand...

I don't think you're quite explaining yourself right. If that were really the case, then I apparently have hundreds of GB of RAM.
 
Applespider said:
Honestly, you don't need to worry about the inactive RAM. OS X handles memory much better than Windows.
Click to expand...

That's not saying much 😛
Mac OS X makes mistakes sometimes. VMWare Fusion rarely causes my inactive RAM to take over the free RAM, and the computer lags like a dead whale until I purge in Terminal. Then it's fine. Inactive RAM otherwise works fine, but there's some issue with VMWare Fusion.

My friend actually ran into a rare case just now when he just had Safari and stuff open, and his inactive RAM was huge and slowing his computer down. It's OK now.

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chucknorris said:
I don't think this can be stressed enough. It is SUPPOSED to be that way. OS X does a very good job of managing memory to optimize performance.
Click to expand...

It sometimes fails terribly under specific conditions. It's happened to me a few times. Inactive RAM taking up gigabytes, 10MB of free RAM, and the computer almost freezes up totally. That's not optimizing performance. Then I remove that optimization temporarily with purge, and it's 1000X more responsive.

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CanadaRAM said:
Isn't it more likely that

1) Parallels, in one or more specific configurations, has a serious issue with OSX memory management, and
2) Virtually every other OSX program does not?
Click to expand...

Agreed, and throw in VMWare Fusion with that.
 
Great thread... 12 years and still going. But I have to echo the OP that OSX 10.4's memory management is crap. It works fine most of the time, but periodically fails catastrophically. I still have a 1.8 GHz G4 with 2 GB RAM, and I keep a 300 MB RAMdisk active at all times, e.g. for temp stuff, downloads, unzipping, etc. But occasionally, OSX will swap part or all of my RAMdisk to the hard drive--even though there are many hundreds of MB of inactive RAM. This should NEVER, EVER happen under any circumstances (i.e. a RAMdisk getting swapped to VM). Hence, OSX is only marginally functional crap.

Btw macrumors, please revert your javascript. TenFourFox (a Firefox port for OSX 10.4/10.5) grabbed 600 MB just to load your webpage. Nor did the captcha ever appear, etc. Nobody's impressed by stuff like that. (and the same thing happened on my Core i5 running Win7) Thanx.
 
Ha - might as well join in 🙂

Up until 10.10, this was a serious issue with OS X.

Basically, in theory when more memory was needed, the kernel should have freed "inactive" and made it available to any applications which wanted it (as they were being used whereas closed applications still in "inactive" memory aren't as important). But in practice, this rarely happened, and instead the kernel would start paging "active" memory to disk (which is very slow) causing vm memory usage to grow in order to provide memory to the application that wanted it.

You could very easily see this by plotting active, inactive, free, wired and Vu memory on a graph over time: if the OS X kernel had worked as it should have, when active memory increased, inactive should have gone down to compensate, as OS X should be freeing it to give it to active running applications. Instead inactive would often stay constant, as would free memory, but wired and Vu (paged VM memory) would increase.

Apple fixed this in 10.10.
 
Aea said:
This really just doesn't justify a response, but let's go over this again. This is by DESIGN, unused memory (cleared / closed program) is left in your RAM and effectively the same of free RAM, it can be freely used by any program and incurs no speed hit (in fact it improves speed since when you relaunch something which already exists in inactive, there's not as much load incurred).

The reason that parallels is slow is because it's a piece of crap.
Click to expand...
.............................. this user needs to be real and up the ram to 16GB...just do it.
 
Back to topic, I've used memory clean since I had a MBA 2011 with 2GB ram. Now memory clean 2 is out, and it seems to be doing a better job on my MBA 2013 with 8GB ram.
 
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