Snow Leopard memory usage

[mbpcron]

I posted this thought on another thread a couple of days ago but forgot where. I noticed using iStat that after a clean boot, SL used twice the memory of a clean Leopard boot after everything settles down. So all these nice tweaks come at a price. I did get back 5GB of disk space but wonder if I'd rather have the memory. By the way, wasn't one of the benefits supposed to be faster and leaner? Yes, but leaner disk space swapped for more memory. Hope the memory mgt is good when I fire up 15 apps. We'll see.
Example, you can view running video thumbnails. That's where part of the memory went. etc.
I haven't decided it's bad yet. Just an observation. Any feedback?

 

[Hellhammer]

My memory usage is quite same as in Leopard, maybe even better in SL.

 

[mbpcron]

Memory issue gone - weird

Booted my MBP without an external monitor or external USB drive attached and now memory is the same as with Leopard. I had booted 2 or 3 times before and it still seemed to be eating memory. Now things look better.
Solution - detach all and boot once ???

 

[jmpage2]

Booted my MBP without an external monitor or external USB drive attached and now memory is the same as with Leopard. I had booted 2 or 3 times before and it still seemed to be eating memory. Now things look better.
Solution - detach all and boot once ???

Probably has more to do with Spotlight putting a load on the system the first couple of times you had it running since it re-indexes everything after installation/upgrade.

 

[Petoz]

My memory usage seems to be worse in SL. Definitely don't have as much free or inactive memory according to the istat widget or activity monitor. I have nothing connected, and have re booted a number of times since I installed SL.

Is this the case for anyone else? Any suggestions?

 

[Nightwing1986]

My memory usage seems to be worse in SL. Definitely don't have as much free or inactive memory according to the istat widget or activity monitor. I have nothing connected, and have re booted a number of times since I installed SL.

Is this the case for anyone else? Any suggestions?

I posted this in another thread, but as per your model of MBP this may explain a little bit, let me know if it helps you.

I'm not sure if it's new to SL or not, but in Activity Monitor, the wired memory value includes the 256 MB of memory taken by the 9400M if its the active gpu. Consequently, the used value also increases. May explain why some users are reporting 'memory hog' issues.

IIRC, under 10.5 this was not the case. But I may be wrong.

Oh, and the iStat widget will show you your used memory sans the 9400m's chunk.

Example (on a uMB running 10.6 and 4gb of ram)
In activity monitor: 3.03gb free, 667 wired, 258 active, 68 inactive; Used 992.8 MB

Under iStat widget: 3.03gb free, ~413 wired, 258 active, 68 inactive; Used 739 MB

Interesting indeed.
This is after a reboot, waiting about 2 minutes for all the startup processes to calm down.