Macbook Pro Lagging - RAM full even after reboot?

[pjk]

The last month or so my Macbook has been really sluggish, and started randomly without me doing anything differently.

I have a 2.2Ghz i7, running MacOS 10.9.5, with 4GB of RAM.
I have a 500GB HD with 165GB currently available.

I've reset the PRAM and that didn't help. I've cleared loads of disk space and that didn't help. I installed Avast Antivirus and it didn't help. I can't figure out what the issue is. I just rebooted and it shows the RAM as "Physical Memory: 4GB" and "Used Memory: 3.99GB". This was before launching anything other than Activity Manager.

Looking at the list, nothing seems to stand out as using too much RAM. The top 2 right now are kernel_task, and Google Chrome, using 459MB and 260MB respectively. The total list doesn't seem to even add up to 3.99GB either, but though is just based off estimation.

Looking at the login items for my user account, there is only a couple small programs set to open on login.

Any recommendations on what to do next? I can just buy 4GB RAM more and add it, but I am really curious why this issue is happening now and didn't before. And ideally, I'd want to solve it before upgrading anyways.

Thanks a lot for your time.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I've seen something like this before with issues of old printer programs running rogue and using all your RAM.

Chrome is a terrible resource hog especially on the pages running flash.

 

[maflynn]

I'd see if the performance issues disappear when you use Safari instead of Chrome, which is a resource hog. Avast will make your machine slower not faster as well, I'd look to uninstall it.

 

[pjk]

Thanks for the recommendations. Using Firefox for the last 10 minutes is a noticable difference for sure. However, I'm wondering why it started within the last month and not before. Did Chrome release some update in the last month or something?

I've removed Avast too.