memory useage, can someone explain?

[agentphish]

I was wondering if anyone might be able to explain my memory useage on my mac... I was downloading a bunch of stuff all at once (like 6 quicktime movies from a website), safari seemed to be using about 120mb of ram, and I was trying to play a movie in quicktime and the system seemed to be grinding to a halt... Quicktime in particular was acting like a fool...The only other things i had open were itunes(not playing any music) and mail.

I have 1.5gb of ram... after this all happened I killed safri and quicktime... system still seemed very sluggish... I looked at activity monitor and I don't quite understand how i only had about 360mb "free"... I don't really understand what "inactive" means and how i have so little free. Preview also crashed twice as well when i was quitting it... don't really understand that one...

I had shut down and reboot the computer about 2 hours ago and i wasn't doing anything heavy till I was doing all that mentioned above

here is a screenshot..
http://home.comcast.net/~agentphish/mem.png

 

[mad jew]

Think of inactive RAM as free RAM that has been assigned to a process but isn't currently being used and could easily be reassigned to another process. For all intents and purposes, inactive RAM and free RAM combine to give you the full "free" or useable amount.

At the moment, it's not sounding like you have a lack of memory problem but maybe something else. CPU usage appears to be normal too FWIW. As a start, I'd check my hard drive status in Disk Utility to make sure it's all working properly. Next, I'd make sure I had at least 8GB of free space on my start up drive. Then, I'd start a new account through System Preferences and see if the slowness carries over.

There's a small bit of information about Activity Monitor and RAM here if you're interested.

 

[agentphish]

thanks for a speedy reply... duh... dind't even think to check apple for explanations on that stuff... I have 30gb free on my 80gb drive. I just never had the system grind to a halt like that in the year and a half that i have had it, particularly when using quicktime, i just got a beachball and that was all she wrote till i force quit.

other suggestions/comments?

 

[mad jew]

Is it back up to speed now? There are some other suggestions in my original reply but I wouldn't worry about them if it was a one-off.