RAM usage in OS X

[MeanD3feat]

I have 2GB of RAM in my G5 iMac (spec below) and when I looked at activity monitor 810mb (ish) of that was used (according to the pie chart).
Breaks down like this:
120ish wired
160ish Active
530ish Inactive

I have Firefox open-1 window 2 tabs and a 245 mb file being downloaded in the little downloads box (nwn demo)
iTunes open, just playing, minimized in the dock
and activity monitor open.

I am running OS X 3.8 and I'm connected to the internet over a wireless network.
Should this much memory be in use? I read that unless I was doing video editing I shouldn't need anymore than 750mb-but I'm doing nothing taxing at the mo and usage is over that! 😕

 

[Timelessblur]

it more or less fine. If you computer has a lot of free ram you OS is not going to bother trying to save free spae in the ram as long as you have that much free. Why bother it only hurt speeded transfer it back to page files.

 

[Lacero]

Perfectly normal. OSX will take advantage of as much RAM as is available on your system. Its very aggressive in how it stores caches, etc.

 

[MeanD3feat]

Thank you both!
I'm a little nervous with OS X and the iMac at the mo, since it is relatively new, anything that seems remotely out of the ordinary sets alarm bells ringin I'm afraid. 🙄
Thanks 😎

 

[Platform]

Perfectly normal. OSX will take advantage of as much RAM as is available on your system. Its very aggressive in how it stores caches, etc.

So the more RAM you have OS X will use more of it
So if you only have let say 256 then there would only be 200 used 😕 or am I wrong

 

[Cybernanga]

So the more RAM you have OS X will use more of it
So if you only have let say 256 then there would only be 200 used 😕 or am I wrong

Well, OS X will use as much as it needs. It tries to minimise using the disks as Virtual Memory, so the more RAM you have, the less it needs to access the disk.

If you have 256, OSX will use 256 if it needs to. If you have 2GB, it wouldn't use all of it if you just ran TextEdit, but if you use a more RAM hungry app, it will use more. Hope that clears up any confusion

 

[Platform]

Well, OS X will use as much as it needs. It tries to minimise using the disks as Virtual Memory, so the more RAM you have, the less it needs to access the disk.

If you have 256, OSX will use 256 if it needs to. If you have 2GB, it wouldn't use all of it if you just ran TextEdit, but if you use a more RAM hungry app, it will use more. Hope that clears up any confusion

Thanks

Well that I would say makes the OS quite smart 🙄

 

[daveL]

There have been many threads on this topic. Here's my post in a similar thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/1165201/

You may find the whole thread interesting.

HTH