Is the used memory too much?

[yahoohoo]

I just got my low-end MBP 13'' 2010, and it's my first contact with Mac OS. Since I got experiences with Linux, it's quite easy to work with the new system. But I found my SL 10.6.6 took roughly 2GBytes although there were just few applications running. Please see the attached figure. Is this normal? Thanks for any reply.

 

[ECUpirate44]

I dont think its abnormal. Are the numbers fluctuating or are they pretty consistent? A restart will clear your RAM.

 

[Hellhammer]

Free RAM is wasted RAM. If you got plenty of empty RAM sitting there, then the OS and apps will take advantage of it. It's no use to have e.g. 90% free just for the sake of it being free. OS and apps will use more RAM if there is more RAM available in order to improve the performance.

EDIT: Inactive RAM is free as well so you are really only using about 1.3GB.

 

[yahoohoo]

I dont think its abnormal. Are the numbers fluctuating or are they pretty consistent? A restart will clear your RAM.

Thanks for your swift reply.

After restarting, the used memory is still roughly the same, no big change.

 

[yahoohoo]

Free RAM is wasted RAM. If you got plenty of empty RAM sitting there, then the OS and apps will take advantage of it. It's no use to have e.g. 90% free just for the sake of it being free. OS and apps will use more RAM if there is more RAM available in order to improve the performance.

My Win XP just takes up less than 200MBytes. That's why I'm wondering. Looks like the two systems work in different ways from your explanation.

 

[ECUpirate44]

Looks like the two systems work in different ways from your explanation.

Very much so.

 

[Hellhammer]

My Win XP just takes up less than 200MBytes. That's why I'm wondering. Looks like the two systems work in different ways from your explanation.

Windows XP was designed for early 2000s computers. Computers at that time had a fraction of RAM compared to today's computers. That's why it will also use less RAM since it was designed to use less. OS X, on the other hand, is designed to use more RAM since SL is less than 2 years old and designed for today's computers. XP also looks plainer and doesn't have cool animations and stuff that generally like to eat RAM.

 

[yahoohoo]

Windows XP was designed for early 2000s computers. Computers at that time had a fraction of RAM compared to today's computers. That's why it will also use less RAM since it was designed to use less. OS X, on the other hand, is designed to use more RAM since SL is less than 2 years old and designed for today's computers. XP also looks plainer and doesn't have cool animations and stuff that generally like to eat RAM.

Thanks. Point taken.
Acctually this is my first post on MR. Very helpful.

 

[Miss Terri]

Hi Yahoohoo and welcome to Mac ownership and MR

I have your same computer (2010 MBP 13" 2.4gz, built in November 2010) and I'm really enjoying it (but I've had many older Macs and was most recently using my ancient, creaky iBook after a premature Macbook death, so this seemed like a HUGE upgrade).

I don't know if I *needed* to do this, but because of my Firefox tab-hogging ways, I just ordered an 8gb RAM uprgrade for my MBP. It's just so darned affordable now (I remember when it used to be a big-hairy-expensive upgrade ). (Even a respected name brand 8gb kit was under $100 and easy to install oneself.) At least from my understanding, lotsa tabs open = lotsa RAM useful (if I'm wrong, anyone feel free to correct me!) (Of course maybe you are not a tab hog anyway).

I envy you your Linux skills -- I bet you'll just be playing around in Terminal whereas I have to steel my nerves to do so

Mostly just posting to say "welcome" (but I read the thread because I have been learning more about reading the activity monitor).

Miss Terri

 

[yahoohoo]

Hi Yahoohoo and welcome to Mac ownership and MR

I have your same computer (2010 MBP 13" 2.4gz, built in November 2010) and I'm really enjoying it (but I've had many older Macs and was most recently using my ancient, creaky iBook after a premature Macbook death, so this seemed like a HUGE upgrade).

I don't know if I *needed* to do this, but because of my Firefox tab-hogging ways, I just ordered an 8gb RAM uprgrade for my MBP. It's just so darned affordable now (I remember when it used to be a big-hairy-expensive upgrade ). (Even a respected name brand 8gb kit was under $100 and easy to install oneself.) At least from my understanding, lotsa tabs open = lotsa RAM useful (if I'm wrong, anyone feel free to correct me!) (Of course maybe you are not a tab hog anyway).

I envy you your Linux skills -- I bet you'll just be playing around in Terminal whereas I have to steel my nerves to do so

Mostly just posting to say "welcome" (but I read the thread because I have been learning more about reading the activity monitor).

Miss Terri

Thanks for your welcome post, . My working desktop has Fedora, which is even more user friendly than WinXP. The reason I bought the MBP is to experience Mac OS which is closer to Linux. Let's have fun with our MBP's.

 

[adnoh]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8F190)

Don't worry, you don't want to be like that guy who has 16gb ram but only 4gb used lol

 

[grahamnp]

OSX tends to take up as much RAM as it can and then free it up only when something else needs it, this keeps the apps that are using the RAM speedy.

 

[yahoohoo]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8F190)

Don't worry, you don't want to be like that guy who has 16gb ram but only 4gb used lol

I'm just sticking to the low-end configuration. That's enough for me,