Question about Typical Memory Usage

[bigdb11]

My iStat menus say that I have 466mb wired, 560mb active, 142mb inactive, and 2.59gb Free. Is this normal with firefox and ichat open? I feel like that is kind of a lot to be in use for doing so little.

 

[gr8tfly]

This might help: Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[bigdb11]

This might help: Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Yea, I've seen that but I dunno, it seems that there is a lot being used by relatively few and non memory intensive programs.

 

[gr8tfly]

At the moment, the instance of Safari 4 I have running has a RSIZE of 255MB.

I don't think you have anything abnormal going on.

Here's a bit more info on RSIZE & VSIZE (the article is referring to "top", but the definitions are the same for Activity Monitor): Mac OS X: How to View Memory Usage With the "top" Utility

 

[bigdb11]

At the moment, the instance of Safari 4 I have running has a RSIZE of 255MB.

I don't think you have anything abnormal going on.

Here's a bit more info on RSIZE & VSIZE (the article is referring to "top", but the definitions are the same for Activity Monitor): Mac OS X: How to View Memory Usage With the "top" Utility

So, OS X uses up a lot of RAM on its own?

 

[CanadaRAM]

Yes: Basically, don't worry about it, let OSX manage its own memory.

There's only one thing you should montior, and that is the PageOut/PageIn ratio. The absolute numbers don't mean much but if the ratio of Outs to Ins gets above 5%, keep an eye on it. If it goes above 10 - 15%, that means you are regularly exceeding the amount of physical RAM you have , and the machine is being slowed down by frequent writes to the hard drive to accommodate the overflowed RAM. At that point consider installing more memory.