Inactive RAM taking over!

[yalag]

hey is there any update to this? I find the macbook pro of mine becomes very slow after 1-2 days of use. This is ridiculous, what is this a windows? I'm forced to reboot to get the speed back? WTF?

 

[GGJstudios]

hey is there any update to this? I find the macbook pro of mine becomes very slow after 1-2 days of use. This is ridiculous, what is this a windows? I'm forced to reboot to get the speed back? WTF?

You don't need to reboot. When you're experiencing slow performance, do the following:

1. Launch Activity Monitor
2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
3. Click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
5. Take a screen shot of the whole Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
6. Post your screenshots.

 

[yalag]

You don't need to reboot. When you're experiencing slow performance, do the following:

1. Launch Activity Monitor
2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
3. Click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
5. Take a screen shot of the whole Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
6. Post your screenshots.

Ok I'll come back and post after 1-2 days, I just rebooted.

 

[spalda2]

No, you're both thick as hell. Restating the posted support doc: inactive memory will be overwritten as needed, with no performance penalty relative to free memory. Free memory is wasted memory; a "smart" OS will fill it with prefetched data (à la Windows Vista/7).

If you're having performance problems, the root cause lies elsewhere.

Actually no

The fact is (as some others have mentioned already) that Lion seemingly randomly converts practically all free mem to an "inactive" one (whatever that means in Apple's Lion language. and i appreaciate what it should mean).

When all free mem is almost exhausted in the above mentioned "conversion" process then any activity can and sometimes does cause system to completely freeze. Before it perceptably slows down.

And yes, it never happened on Snow Leopard. On Snow Leopard it did behave as "proper" inactive mem.

 

[throAU]

Inactive RAM is largely disk cache. Pretend to yourself "inactive" ram is free ram (because, essentially, it is), and move on.