RAM Question

[surfer99]

I just upgraded my macbook to 2gb of ram and I am starting to get curious as to what all this (free, wired, active, inactive, used, vm size, pages in, pages out and swaped used) means. Could some one let me know what I am looking at and what I should know about this screen and also if there is anything that looks wrong or out of place (since I just installed my RAM I basically want to make sure everything looks as it should).

Thanks in advanced

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

When that pic was taken, you had only 2 apps open, w/ approx 1GB of ram unused, and Ø pageouts, which is generally great. But the real test would be for you to open and run several of your most frequently used apps while watching the activity monitor.

If your unused ram (in the pie chart) goes down close to Ø and/or the pageouts go way way up (which should happen almost simultaneously), then you may want to consider adding more ram. Or if you see any of the apps that are using an inordinately huge chunk of ram under normal usage, then it have a memory leak, which is a sign of sloppy programming & coding by the developer.

If this happens, be sure to notify them immediately, giving all the related system details and facts so they hopefully can/will fix it and issue an update asap!

OTOH, if none of the above applies, then don't concern yourself with the numbers in Activity monitor........your mac is fine & the OS will take care of the background stuff for you