RAM Usage

[macgeek77]

I am testing out my new gig of RAM in my iMac g5 iSight. I opened up the following apps:

Mail, Camino, Firefox, Safari, Sherlock, Address Book, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iPhoto, Calendar, Word, Powerpoint, Excell, Quicksilver, Stickies, TubeSock, DrJava, Terminal, Disk Utility, System Profiler, and Constrictor.

I currently have 1.5 gigs of RAM, but it seemed that the system slowed down A LOT after having all these open (and Camino was playing a YouTube clip). When I checked the activity monitor: only 327.35 MB were active!! 264.48 MB were free, and 802.94 MB were inactive!! What is going on here that the majority of my memory is not free but just inactive?? IS there something wrong with my RAM? Thanks for any help?

 

[mad jew]

Inactive RAM means it was in use by another app/process but is now available for a different app/process, albeit if needed for it's original app/process it will be applied there in place of using your free RAM. Those figures imply you're not even close to using all the RAM you have installed. More likely the computer slowed down because it was opening the files from the hard drive which is relatively slow, plus you may have been maxing out your CPU and/or GPU.

Bad RAM will cause crashes and erratic behaviour. By the sounds of things, your RAM's just fine.

 

[CanadaRAM]

I am testing out my new gig of RAM in my iMac g5 iSight. I opened up the following apps:

Mail, Camino, Firefox, Safari, Sherlock, Address Book, iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iPhoto, Calendar, Word, Powerpoint, Excell, Quicksilver, Stickies, TubeSock, DrJava, Terminal, Disk Utility, System Profiler, and Constrictor.

I currently have 1.5 gigs of RAM, but it seemed that the system slowed down A LOT after having all these open (and Camino was playing a YouTube clip). When I checked the activity monitor: only 327.35 MB were active!! 264.48 MB were free, and 802.94 MB were inactive!! What is going on here that the majority of my memory is not free but just inactive?? IS there something wrong with my RAM? Thanks for any help?

The reason it has slowed down is because you have opened about 4 Gb of programs (including Rosetta) and your poor machine is swapping scratch files on and off the hard drive furiously. This is like saying: "I have a one and a half gallon bucket and I want to test it for leaks. So I poured 4 gallons of water into it and Boy Howdy! there's water everywhere. Do I have a probem with the bucket?"

Don't worry about the way OSX allocates the RAM. It's way smarter than you in this regard. Just let it do its work.

Figure on needing 1 Gb RAM whenever you open a MS Office program (or any other Rosetta program), so 1.5 Gb is good, but not excessively much -- don't attempt such massive multitasking.

 

[spork183]

The reason it has slowed down is because you have opened about 4 Gb of programs (including Rosetta)
Figure on needing 1 Gb RAM whenever you open a MS Office program (or any other Rosetta program)

I thought rosetta was an intel creation. He's running a G5.

 

[CanadaRAM]

I thought rosetta was an intel creation. He's running a G5.

Oops. Yes, obviously Rosetta isn't part of this. Still, that's a bargeload of programs to be opening.

 

[AlBDamned]

The reason it has slowed down is because you have opened about 4 Gb of programs (including Rosetta) and your poor machine is swapping scratch files on and off the hard drive furiously. This is like saying: "I have a one and a half gallon bucket and I want to test it for leaks. So I poured 4 gallons of water into it and Boy Howdy! there's water everywhere. Do I have a probem with the bucket?"

Don't worry about the way OSX allocates the RAM. It's way smarter than you in this regard. Just let it do its work.

Nice analogy CanadaRAM. I was wondering what it all meant. I've just installed my new 1GB stick to max out my PowerBook and have lots of inactive RAM. Tellingly though, there's now 200MB+ of unused RAM, which is good news. Before there was about 10MB if any.

 

[janey]

if that's bad..