RAM usage

Discussion in 'MacBook Pro' started by evaporateddwarf, Mar 18, 2011.

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  1. evaporateddwarf, Mar 18, 2011

    evaporateddwarf macrumors regular

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    #1
    How much RAM is it normal to use in day to day activity? When running safari or Chrome, preview and word/excel, with 8GB of ram, I'm regularly having only 4-5 gigs free. If flash gets involved, Safari eats up roughly 2GB of ram (sometimes less, sometimes more), and when flash is running, flash taking up about 1.5GB, and my free ram dips all the way down to 3.5-3.8 sometimes. Is this kind of usage normal? I don't see how this could be normal, as those with 2-4GB would be unable to run 3 basic programs if this were the case. I got this much ram for when i'm doing audio production. I didn't expect to be using 50% of it while web browsing and writing documents.
     
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  2. dusk007, Mar 18, 2011

    dusk007 macrumors 68040

    dusk007

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    #2
    The more RAM is available the more many programs use. Still 2GB is a lot. Safari is a huge resource hog and has mostly useless features. Use a decent browser like Opera or Chrome.
    Flash 1.5GB just sounds weird. How about you post a screen shot of activity monitor.
     
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  3. evaporateddwarf, Mar 21, 2011

    evaporateddwarf thread starter macrumors regular

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    #3
    It never went up to 2GB, but here's a couple screen captures. With one window open, safari was taking 300MB+, on top of the 800MB+ for flash. With a few tabs open, flash jumped above 1GB.
     

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  4. SuperCachetes, Mar 21, 2011

    SuperCachetes macrumors 6502a

    SuperCachetes

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    #4
    Sounds normal to me; I have roughly the same programs open (plus iTunes) and show 4.24GB free out of the 8GB on my MBP.

    I expect OSX does some caching to use up available memory. "Free RAM" is wasted RAM.
     
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  5. brentsg, Mar 21, 2011

    brentsg macrumors 68040

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    #5
    If you aren't having page-outs then you don't need more RAM.
     
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