I have 8GB of ram total. I ALWAYS only have around 8 to 20mb free ram. I know inactive ram (which hangs out at around 3GB) is suppose to lease when other applications need it but this isn't happening. Is there any way I can set a maximum size for inactive ram, so for instance make it so it can never exceed 2GB?
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No free RAM
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Can you post a screen shot of your System Memory usage in Activity Monitor? No, you can't set an adjustment for inactive RAM, but how do you know it's not being made available to other apps?
After I've had my iMac running for awhile (an 8 hour session or so) opening, or using a program is really slow for a few minutes and I look at my free ram and there's something really small like 8mb free. As I continue using my Mac it continues to freeze more frequently and the 8mb free reduces even more down to 4mb and even 1mb. I even went as far recently in real life as to stick an extra 4GB ramstick in my imac and it now takes longer to get slow and sluggish, but it still does:
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Here's a tip: edit your last post and change the IMG tags to TIMG, so the image won't be so large.
It appears you're not paging much at all, which indicates your inactive RAM is, indeed, being made available to other apps. If that wasn't the case, your page outs would be much higher. How long has it been since your last restart?
It's not necessary to restart for good performance. The purpose of restarting is to reset the page outs and swap used to zero, since both are cumulative numbers since the last restart. You can run for weeks or months at a time without restarting and without decreased performance.
Sorry about my image, thanks for that. Probably ten hours or so is when I turned my iMac on. But on my old 2008 iMac there were times where I didn't turn it off for even a month at a time and it didn't used to do this 🙁
Rather than focus on RAM, which doesn't appear to be the source of your performance issues, sort by CPU utilization and keep an eye on what app(s) may be tying up CPU resources.
On the bottom of the CPU tab, it seldomly ever goes over 10% for user, or is there someplace else I should be looking 😛
At the top of the window, click on the CPU column heading to sort descending, with the most CPU utilization on top. That will allow you to CPU use by individual processes.
