I have puzzling question: 1gb of inactive RAM, little free RAM, and mucho page outs..

[Mactrillionaire]

I do run Flashblock, as I mentioned above. So any flash things in a website just show up as static icons, unless and until I click on them. So with that, does Adobe Flash still run amok with my memory? I was thinking that was "disabling it"?

Real world-example of my usage: 16 tabs open, and on one of the tabs I click on a video and watch it. After that I close that tab. The other 15 tabs are under the influence of Flashblock and (as I understand it) don't have flash running.

4GB of RAM should be more than sufficient for your use. If it isn't then an installed program is to blame.

If you still are having ridiculous memory usage after you upgraded your RAM to 8GB then I would recommend backing up your files to another hard disk and doing a fresh install of the operating system. Then, after you have done that, you can add back one application at a time and see if you can find some that lead to ridiculous consumption of memory.

 

[Miss Terri]

4GB of RAM should be more than sufficient for your use. If it isn't then an installed program is to blame.

I'm kind of glad to hear that it's not normal, as it did seem odd to me.

The only problem with the idea of "blaming" a program is that I have so few programs that did not come pre-loaded on the MBP. There are only five (listed below) and the only new one is iStat Pro. The other four I have had since my old white Macbook (which, if they didn't slow down THAT computer...). Not to mention that this problem occurs without any of them open except for FF and iStat.

Let's see, I looked through Applications and Utilities folders and this is what I have that did not come pre-loaded from Apple:

1) iStat Pro, which I added new to this computer.

2) Microsoft Office for Mac x, which is an old PowerPC program that I can't even open on this computer unless I download Rosetta, which I have not done.

3) Firefox 3.6, which as we've discussed might be to blame (although.... even if it is a RAM hog apparently other people used it when it was the current FF) (But I will probably download FF4 to reduce that problem.)

4) NetNewsWire - which I brought over from my Macbook and use to read feeds (but this problem happens when that is closed).

5) Skype, which I have not opened or used since this problem became noticeable (also brought over from my Macbook).

6?) I thought I had Adobe Flash and Acrobat Reader, but I don't see them anywhere. Are they technically programs? Where do they live on the computer?

I know it probably seems incredible to people who download a lot of stuff, but these are the only programs that I've added that did not come on the computer (i.e. Apple's own stuff).

Barring anyone coming up with some amazing new theory, I will change one variable at a time. I think I'll add the RAM first thing, and see if FF 3.6 can suck down 8GB of Crucial's finest

Presuming that all goes well and I get back up and running with the 8GB, I'll next look at Flash and Firefox (I like controlled experiments )

Thanks again for your input

Miss Terri

 

[Mactrillionaire]

I know in the beginning of the thread that you posted an Activity Monitor image of your System Memory, but that isn't really enough for us to go on. If you could go back to Activity Monitor, go back to the System Memory tab, select to show All Processes and then sort by clicking on the Real Memory and take a picture of that that would be more helpful. If you have any concerns about privacy, you can of course blank out the user column in iPhoto.

 

[puglover72]

Did you ever find a solution to this? having the same problems....

Miss Terri, i found your thread looking for a solution to the same problem. i'm on a 4 year old mac pro tower running 12GB of ram and i am getting down to 10MB or less with 7GB or more of 'inactive ram' and my computer is slowing to a halt. this computer has always had issues, since i got it - so i thought maybe it was just one more of them, however it seems i'm not the only one. i did switch from firefox to using safari after reading this and that has seemed to helped some, but not much. I tend to be a heavy user when it comes to browser windows (sometimes w/20+ open and often one is netflix streaming on my other screen) so i'm sure this isn't helping but i dont understand why that memory is seemingly unavailable. so if you have discovered a fix for this let me know! feel free to email my privately too. i'm about ready to just buy a new computer.

 

[Freyqq]

Hi all,

I have a question about something that is puzzling me with my system, and I wonder if any of you can help me with it. I have searched out and read a number of older threads but they didn't really help me (I did try though).

Also, sorry to be so wordy, but I can't see holding back information and then we just have to go back and forth while you pry it out of me bit by bit

This is my 4-month old MBP 13", with 2.4ghz C2D, 4GB RAM, and 250gb HD. I'm running 10.6.4.

I'm a pretty light user EXCEPT I'm a major "tab hog" in Firefox I just love tabs!

So, I notice that as I build up my tabs, my "Memory pie" starts to look a bit odd. I'll have almost no free RAM (say 30mb), about 2GB of active RAM, and then over 1 GB of "inactive RAM." But when the free RAM gets down that low, FF gets really unresponsive and starts beachballing.

From my reading, it seemed that the system would "know" to just make use of that "inactive" RAM if it needed it, but this almost makes it seem like it's not doing that.

Another thing is that, for example, right now I have 2.8 GB of Page Ins, but relatively whopping almost 7 GB of Page Outs. Again, from my reading it sounds like having a lot more page outs than page ins means you need more RAM. But that seems odd with 25% of my total RAM "inactive."

Here is a shot of my Activity Monitor now; this is the behavior I mean:

View attachment 280675

FF is using around 40-50% of my CPU, and everything else is at like .8% or less, so although FF is using a lot, everything else is nearly nothing.

Also, I use FlashBlocker on FF, so even though I have a lot of tabs open, there is not rampant flash usage on them.

Okay, now I also read that "inactive" RAM comes from programs you recently closed, in case you open them again. Okay, that makes sense. Except, to experiment, after I read about that, I closed all my programs except FF and Mail for a long time, and still I had the extremely small amount of free RAM, and the huge amount of inactive RAM, at which point FF would start to beachball. At the same time the computer begins to get much hotter. Not that it's too hot, but just this seems to go along with the overall behavior. It will go from its usual 45ºC up to 60ºC or so. Again, not a worry in and of itself, but it coincides with the "no" free RAM and the beachballing FF.

If anyone can shed any light on this, I would much appreciate it. I did read Apple's page on memory and how it works, but they were a bit vague on a few things.

Thank you!

Miss Terri

PS: I do have 8GB of RAM ready to install, but I still want to understand this, because.... am I then going to have the same thing but just with MORE inactive RAM? I want to understand it.

inactive ram seems to level out at 1/4 your total ram and then it starts caching to the HD. Not really sure why, but it seems to do that every time.

 

[GGJstudios]

inactive ram seems to level out at 1/4 your total ram and then it starts caching to the HD. Not really sure why, but it seems to do that every time.

FYI: In case you didn't notice, the post you quoted is close to a year old. puglover72 resurrected the thread.

 

[Miss Terri]

I came back to the forums after an absence and noticed this thread was resurrected. Just figured I'd follow up and say that - although I don't understand it completely - what I have found is that if I have a browser open (Safari or FF) with many tabs, it just slowly eats up my RAM until there is none left. If I close the browser and start over, it fixes the problem (until it happens again after awhile).

Miss Terri

 

[dusk007]

That shouldn't be an issue. In chrome each tab will suck 50-100MB.
Open 40 tabs and you may end up at 4GB. Those have to be stored somewhere or unloaded. Old browser just used to kill it and reloaded upon reactivation which takes with a cached source code split seconds. Today browser simply swap out the memory that isn't shared. That can lead to high memory usage but it doesn't actually hurt. With an SSD one would barely notice the swap in compared to a reload from cache and from HDD it should still be quite quick and only ever stall when you reactivate a tab that you loaded quite a while back.

If you computer gets slow that is usually to one tab with some buggy Java Script or something. I often watch my cpu load and check the Chrome task manager. Sometimes one tab just sucks loads one cpu core 100% even though it is in the background. Nytimes is often one such bad boy.
Desktop browser don't suspend background tabs like mobile (smartphone) browsers do. So any background tab that has some buggy webpage will put insane load on the cpu forever until you close it.

Just look at the built in task manager of chrome or the FF equivalent (I am sure there is one).
RAM consumption itself doesn't make anything slow other than causing a split second stall when you click a background tab you loaded 20 min ago. It should never make the whole system slow. In theory at least.

 

[iWeekend]

Big thanks to whoever suggested 'purge' ... worked a charm without a reboot.