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No Free RAM?

S

stevier95

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 27, 2011
7
0
Hi everyone,
I've followed this forum for a while without becoming a member. I've finally joined and i have a question for all of you mac gurus out there. Take a look at the screenshot i've attached. I have a few programs opened, nothing major, just preview, outlook, messenger and a few safaris. Yet my RAM has nothing free. Any reasons why?
Thanks
Stevie
 

Attachments

  • Screen shot 2011-03-27 at 8.15.04 PM.png
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Inactive RAM is free RAM. Take a look at Activity Monitor to check what is using your RAM. I find that I need to relaunch Safari every now and then to reset its RAM usage.
 
whats the point of having ram and not using it? you dont want to be like that guy who has 16gb ram but only uses 4gb of it.

you can always upgrade if you think your system is slowing down.
 
Just curious as to why its suddenly gone up without increasing the amount of stuff I'm doing. Not at all saying i don't want to use all of it, just wanting to learn :)
 
Just do a restart if you've not done one for a while, that will free up your RAM again. Not that there's any 'problem' with having no free RAM, but it does mean your system will page to the hard drive more often, which will slow things down.
 
Last edited:
OK, here we go again.

After upgrading to SL when it came out, I immediately noticed that the typical amount of free RAM was decreased markedly. In addition, pageouts (swapping) went up, sometimes remarkably, even with gobs of inactive RAM supposedly available for use.

My working assumption has been that Apple has changed some algorithms in SL such that data/apps stay in inactive RAM for much longer than before, and there may be some "corner case" scenarios whereby the system will actually page out to disk with inactive RAM available - in fact, I've seen this behavior first-hand on my systems.

The advantage for Apple to hang onto old data for long amounts of time is that you'll get re-launches of apps in very quick times - so I can understand why this has been done. But I also surmise that the changes that they've made aren't 100% correct, and in some people's configurations/usage patterns/apps, it makes mistakes and hangs onto data that it should just flush.

I fixed the issue by upgrading to 8Gb on both my server and MacBook and the issue has gone away since then. My server was almost at a 1:1 ratio page ins to page outs, it was bad...

You can also run "Repair Permissions" in Disk Utility on your startup drive to reclaim the free RAM. May be quicker than a reboot.
 
I can report that the issue with poor memory management in Mac OS X has been addressed (at least for my usage patterns) in Mountain Lion.

Jeez, almost 3 years of swapping with plenty of RAM available, hopefully that era is done now.
 
adnoh said:
whats the point of having ram and not using it? you dont want to be like that guy who has 16gb ram but only uses 4gb of it.

you can always upgrade if you think your system is slowing down.
Click to expand...

HEY! It's my eighty bucks, I'll do what I want with it!!!!


As God as my witness, I will never have to close another tab again!

And yes, Safari does feel snappier. Really.


:p
 
Since adding 16 gig of ram to my macbook pro, I can actually go faster on my bicycle. Everything is snappier.

Can't explain it... just snappier.
 
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