Memory usage

When you say you close the application, are you just closing the window (the little red circle with an x) or are you selecting Photoshop (in the top left corner) and going to Quit Photoshop? Because closing the window doesn't exit the program, it just closes the window, so you are still using computer power (and RAM) when you think the application is closed. Welcome to macs

 

So what you are saying is that the program is still taking up RAM after you closed it? Or you just forgot to quit the application

 

Don't worry so much about Free Memory. You'll see that Inactive Memory is available.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

 

Yes. It sits there until needed for the original application by which it is marked or until something else requires memory that isn't otherwise available. If another application requests more free memory than what's available, the VM system looks at inactive memory and takes away from the least current and marks it as free.

 

Memory management questions such as this are very often in this forum. All you must remember is that OS X memory management is very different than Windows'. Programs will take as much memory as possible, even if the current task they perform is not that much demanding. If any other program need more memory than the amount available, memory for all programs is automatically reallocated to suit the needs of all applications.

 

I also notice that after high inactive memory and low free memory, my mac slows down when I open programs or web pages, giving me spinning ball. It really annoys me, I have to reboot the system.

 

Remember that Photoshop is running under Rosetta, which uses up quite a bit of RAM.

 

You don't have to re-boot the system but it's your choice. It's likely just busy restoring memory from disk, not locked up.

 

Any idea how to deal with it?

 

Besides learning patience and waiting for system revisions? No, but I'm sure it will become better. VM works pretty efficiently on PowerPC machines now. I only have a little over 52 MB free and yet, the system is very responsive.

I feel for you all. Even my other machine with 1.5 GB and a 7200 rpm drive suffered a lot of beachballs.

 

I forgot to memtion mine is a PMG5 1.6. I also have a same machine with 512MB memory at work place, it feels very responsive even when the free memory is low.

 

That's bizarre then. How are you on free disk space, fewer than 10 % available? You need to keep enough space available so that the VM system can do its job. If it's creating multiple small swap files, that could be part of the problem because of a lack of contiguous disk space. Someone in that position could do with some cleanup and de-fragmentation.

 

No, I still have 40% free. Maybe because of amule running? I guess I need to do some hard drive cleanup.

 

You can use WhatSize to see what you have on your drives in order of decreasing size.

Still, you've got something odd happening. If you wouldn't mind, please run the command vm_stat from a Terminal window, so we can see the results. My output looks like this:

Code:

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free:                     4895.
Pages active:                  75698.
Pages inactive:                93303.
Pages wired down:              22712.
"Translation faults":       85887160.
Pages copy-on-write:          589910.
Pages zero filled:          66154066.
Pages reactivated:            647541.
Pageins:                      195947.
Pageouts:                      17249.
Object cache: 95284 hits of 330211 lookups (28% hit rate)

 

Here is mine after running amule for 1 day.
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 19205.
Pages active: 146193.
Pages inactive: 323654.
Pages wired down: 35236.
"Translation faults": 62208163.
Pages copy-on-write: 162316.
Pages zero filled: 38562749.
Pages reactivated: 449492.
Pageins: 34258.
Pageouts: 2137.
Object cache: 14230 hits of 37794 lookups (37% hit rate)