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How to free up ram?

H

Hakkinen

macrumors member
Original poster
May 7, 2004
78
0
I have my activity monitor running since yesterday morning.
When I start my machine, i have about 565mb ram free out of my 768mb total. But come end of the day, after a whole day of websurfing, the free ram is almost left with 0 mb! And there is always this Inactive ram that takes up about 200 to 300mb+.Now after restarting since 20 mins ago, my free ram is down to only 192mb and inactive ram is 350mb.
Strange, is this normal?
 
I would say, yes, it is. OS X takes care of your RAM and it will use all there is and then give it to the apps that need it. If there would be too much free RAM, then this would mean that you have too much RAM, because it wouldn't be needed, but why should the OS leave some RAM when it can use it? You cannot have too much RAM, because OS X uses it all and that's good.
 
I do understand the machine will allocate as much ram as available to help the system runs faster and more efficiently.
But for the past few days when I first installed the new ram, there is always more than 300 to 400mb ram free. Don't understand how come the free ram just dropped like that yesterday.
 
Hakkinen said:
I do understand the machine will allocate as much ram as available to help the system runs faster and more efficiently.
But for the past few days when I first installed the new ram, there is always more than 300 to 400mb ram free. Don't understand how come the free ram just dropped like that yesterday.
Click to expand...
Every time you launch an application that you haven't yet launched on this particular boot, Mac OS X caches information in RAM required to launch it so subsequent launches are faster. Mac OS X also allocates plenty of extra RAM to applications since they often need room to grow, and each application uses some of that RAM for its own caches.
 
don't worry about that "inactive" ram, that's as good as "free". it means that osx has at some point loaded something in the ram and later on decided that it is no longer needed. of course the ram could be "freed" (completely) but unix systems have made such a decision that the content is kept in the memory in case it is needed in the future. but because that memory is flagged as "inactive", it can be deleted as soon as some other app needs to have that memory.

so it is just one kind of an optimization - if you should want to access that inactive memory once again, it can be just made active and used instantly, compared to freeing the memory and loading the content from the hard drive into memory again.

to summarize: you can count the "inactive" ram as "free" when you check how much memory your system has available.
 
Freeing up Ram

Help! My word processing software, Office Org won't open on my desktop anymore and I need to free up memory. I don't know how to do it. I went into applescript and I think I temporarily disabled dashboard. But that didn't do anything and I'm not sure I did it correctly.

How do I check my available ram and free up memory so I can open my Office Org again?
 
You can free up RAM by quitting some applications you don't need.
Also, to check your RAM, you can look it up on Activity Monitor under the Utilities folder of the Applications folder.
 
Angelhome

Thank you very much for your help. I checked and it seems like I have Ram available...but on my Office Org software on my desktop when I try to open it, it says 0 KB available. Huh?
 
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