Question about RAM Usage

[BiikeMike]

When you look at the activity monitor, there is wired, active, inactive, and used RAM. What the heck does all that mean?

Like right now, I'm not doing anything except running Firefox, Adium and Activity monitor, and it says I'm using 1.45GB, and only have 567MB free. How can that be possible??

 

[WildCowboy]

Have a look at this Apple support document.

Inactive memory is, for all intents and purposes, free memory.

 

[orangemacapple]

inactive is the same as free.

it was allocated for an app but freed up. it still contains the cache for the last app incase you need it again so it won't have to access the hdd, saving time and energy. if you need it for something else, it will be used the exact same as free.

so for true free ram, add the free with the inactive.

 

[CanadaRAM]

There's lots of threads on this already.

The short answer is: Don't worry about it. Let OSX do its memory management thing - it is very good at it and you don't really have to know.

The only thing to watch for is PageOuts. If you start accumulating a large number of PageOuts (that is, more than 10% of your PageIns) that means you are regularly exceeding the amount of physical RAM you have, and suffering slowdowns writing to hard disk.

 

[BiikeMike]

Thanks for the link Wild Cowboy.

And yes, I know I don't have to worry about it, but I still want to know what it means! And I know I'm not in any danger, as my pageouts are less than 1%