Question on memory use in OS X...

[calyxman]

I have 384 MB of RAM on my iBook running 10.3.9. I haven't rebooted my machine in a while, so I just noticed this after I shut down the machine last night and booted up this morning.

Here's the situation: whenever I'd open activity monitor to check the amount of free RAM available, with no apps or any finder windows open other than activity monitor I'd almost always get a reading of 60-70 Mb. Well today, I booted up the machine, launched activity monitor and I had about 170 Mb free. Wired memory dropped to 40 Mb, Active is at 79, and Inactive is at 92. I booted up with no network connection, but my machine has not been o the network for almost a week now.

So what happened? I mean I did a clean install on this thing 2 weeks ago. Not many apps loaded on besides acrobat and Office. Like I said, when I checked the memory a couple of days ago, I made sure no apps were open. The wired, active and inactive numbers were certainly higher. Now they're lower.

Any ideas?

 

[mkrishnan]

My guess is that your numbers are probably always in the direction of more free memory when you first boot. The system uses memory for lots of things like retaining libraries that apps need, in order to speed up subsequent launches, that haven't had a chance yet to happen when you first boot. I'm sure it'll get back to utilizing the memory after a short amount of use...have you checked it again since then?

 

[crazzyeddie]

Its normal for OS X. Don't worry unless you see one app/process taking up large amounts of Real RAM or are always running at like 20MB free RAM.

 

[calyxman]

Ok. That makes sense. I remember when I used to see Safari taking up as much as 60-70 Mb of memory! Of course that's with a web page loaded in the background with all the flash and other junk loaded.

I'll just keep an eye on it.