Ram usage

[splatterific]

When using snow leopard my activity monitor showed my ram usage fluctuate which is to be expected as app's are running and the amount of ram usage was needed. That worked perfectly ok.
I've been running mountain lion and while checking memory usage it doesn't budge. I have 12gb ram it never moves from 11.98gb of memory used. Am I missing something here?

 

[Alfinator]

When using snow leopard my activity monitor showed my ram usage fluctuate which is to be expected as app's are running and the amount of ram usage was needed. That worked perfectly ok.
I've been running mountain lion and while checking memory usage it doesn't budge. I have 12gb ram it never moves from 11.98gb of memory used. Am I missing something here?

It might be some kind of Glitch in the software you're checking your RAM in.

Otherwise it might be that it's 00.02GB left and that 11.98GB is in use. But that's not likely so I dont know really.

If it's a pre-installed software that comes with the computer then you should check it out with Apple and se if it's any solution.


Sorry if I wasn't much help but that's a really strange problem.

 

[joe-h2o]

When using snow leopard my activity monitor showed my ram usage fluctuate which is to be expected as app's are running and the amount of ram usage was needed. That worked perfectly ok.
I've been running mountain lion and while checking memory usage it doesn't budge. I have 12gb ram it never moves from 11.98gb of memory used. Am I missing something here?

Don't just look at RAM used, also look at the number of Page Outs. If that number is small (or zero, ideally) then you are not running out of RAM and the computer is perfectly happy.

If you have thousands of page outs, then you have something with a memory leak that is sapping your RAM away.

Under normal conditions OS X will leave unused RAM "inactive" - that is, it has data from the last time it was used, but it's otherwise idle. This shows in the stats as used RAM, but it's really not. If the OS needs it then it can purge that and start using it. However, if it happens to need that RAM again (say you open the app again that originally allocated that memory) the OS doesn't need to page it in from disk so you have improved performance.

Having a vast amount of "free" RAM is just under utilising your machine and apps that claim to boost your performance by purging inactive RAM are only hurting your performance. OS X knows how to manage its own memory usage pretty effectively. The only time you have problems are with apps that have memory leaks - and even then these "ram cleaner" programs can't help either.