Question on memory use in OS X...

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?

 

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.