Inactive RAM is RAM that was once occupied by an application that has since been closed. It makes it so when you re-launch that application it opens instantly, since it no longer has to write to ram. There are a couple problems with this method. For one. With an SSD it's no longer needed. SSD's run so fast that a cold open of an application is instant. Secondly, sometimes mac has trouble freeing up that ram for use...and it will lock up your machine until you restart or purge memory. I really hope they change the way Mac handles paging and inactive memory now that we have high speed SSD's.
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Is 16GB Ram practically useless?
- Thread starter Panini
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Inactive RAM is RAM that was once occupied by an application that has since been closed. It makes it so when you re-launch that application it opens instantly, since it no longer has to write to ram. There are a couple problems with this method. For one. With an SSD it's no longer needed. SSD's run so fast that a cold open of an application is instant. Secondly, sometimes mac has trouble freeing up that ram for use...and it will lock up your machine until you restart or purge memory. I really hope they change the way Mac handles paging and inactive memory now that we have high speed SSD's.
I believe 2.17GB are currently storing data but not being used at the time being. I'm sure someone else will provide a more accurate response though.
Ah, the above poster beat me to it
When I had 8gb I was always getting to less than 100mb free ram and had to use an app called iCleanMemory a LOT to free up ram and getting tons of page outs which seemed to slow everything down even with an ssd. I waited for the retina with 16gb and am so glad I did. Highest I have used in the 5 days of ownership is 14gb or so. It is nice to not be always pushing limits. I work with a lot of tabbed browsers open and also in photoshop, maya, unity, various Microsoft office applications. I run 3-4 monitors off the retina with all those applications open and everything works great. Much faster than my 2010 17" w 8gb and ssd. That machine was good this one is great. So glad I got the extra ram.
been using app FREEMEMORY to release it when free memory drops to 1 gig.
But I am still considering keeping the 16 gig I have and returning the 8 gig.
Its a tough call. I just dont see/cant find performance stats ti help me decide.
I am also weighing what might be new features of the next MBP Retina in 1 to 2 years.
Finally what impact will mountain lion have on this inactive memory issue.
I'm really hoping they add something to detect if you are running on SSD and eliminate the need for inactive memory all together! They have hardware checks all the time for their OS...look at the new display settings in the retina display. That's an example of a system preference pane behaving very differently based on a hardware check. It can't be that hard to implement!
It depends what you do.
If you work with data sets that are multiple gigabytes in size (i.e., work with HD video, virtualization, etc) you want all the memory you can get.
If you run a browser, facebook and email, you don't.
Even modern HDDs don't take very long. The 500GB HDDs that you receive in a macbook pro today are much faster than those from a few years ago. The 3.5" drives used in imacs and mac pros are faster than those, so even without an SSD, it shouldn't take very long. If ram was a complete non issue and the application was behaving correctly, you could just dock it rather than close it out. Memory purging applications have their own issues. I wish they'd just rework the memory system there like you mentioned, followed by the HFS+ file system
. The 2011s and 2012s are impressively fast with 16GB+ an SSD (if your file sizes are large enough, you get some paging no matter what).
Evidence please!
Is it really true that ssd access is as fast as ram access? Can anybody back this up or refute it so we can once and for all bury the 8gb versus 16gb debates?
Is it really true that ssd access is as fast as ram access? Can anybody back this up or refute it so we can once and for all bury the 8gb versus 16gb debates?
Depends on your usage. For most people, this is true (and don't even get me started on "futureproofing").
But I'd like to see you virtualize 3-5 computers off 8GB RAM.
No, paging to your SSD is generally 10x slower, which is much quicker than paging to an HDD, but much slower nonetheless.
Yes. You won't perceive the difference between RAM and SSD. Thats why 16gb generally really is a big waste of money. There were days when we only had slow HDDs and RAM was actually useful. But getting anything more than 8 gigs in 2012 is generally a waste of money.
No.
Memory bandwidth is several orders of magnitude faster (SSD speed is in megabytes per second, RAM is hundreds of gigabytes per second). If you need lots of RAM, swapping to anything is no substitute, not even SSD.
Besides, SSD wears out after a limited number of writes. RAM doesn't.
Those claiming there is no difference obviously don't do anything that needs plenty of RAM. Just because you have hit swap a little bit and you haven't noticed the machine slowing down, it doesn't mean SSD is just as fast. When you first start hitting swap, the machine is swapping out INACTIVE memory. I.e., stuff that is just sitting in the background doing nothing.
Try and run 16-20gb (or more) worth of applications with live data (i.e., so you have 12gb of page outs) and see how your machine likes it. You'll start having active parts of your application swapped out, and performance will degrade dramatically - this data will need to be continually swapped in and out of SSD (page thrashing) and you will definitely notice it. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_thrashing
If SSD was just as fast, we wouldn't have just upgraded our vSphere cluster with 384gb of RAM, and would have just popped in a couple of 512gb SSDs....
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Agree, If you need to ask, either you don"t need it or patience is not your virtue
.for 256GB-RAM guy, please attend hardware 101 lessons
or you've graduated from trolling academyNot true at all. I thought that way when I had 2gb of ram in my MBA. But realized when I pushed it by using up all the ram it was slow and it pineheeled a lot. Believe what you will but I'm speaking from experience.
There are various professional uses which make good use of 16 GBs RAM and I'm sure some power users with interesting or unusual computer habits, along with some other people with very bad computer habits, manage it as well.
You can run Vista in Parallels with less than 8 GB RAM with plenty of room to spare.
There's a huge difference between your MacBook Air use case and 8 GBs of RAM in one of these machines.
Ummm, what if your internal SSD is nearly full? That doesn't exactly fly. Not even going to touch everything else that is wrong here. I will say that I am jealous of you and anyone else that found a retina MBP with 256GB of RAM.
I'm sorry, but it is called the MacBook PRO for a reason. Your average consumer that just wants to do what you described is the exact demographic that Apple is aiming the iPad and Air at. Not the MBPro. It is meant for heavy multitasking and content creation/manipulation, in addition to the what you described.
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