Yesterday I was doing several things on my i5 iMac with 12GB memory. I was using Elgato to capture some old VHS home videos, I was listening to music on iTunes, I was surfing with Safari, and had a few other Apps active, but minimized. Just for the heck of it, I decided to look at my memory usage in Activity Monitor. To my surprise, I only had a very small amount of free memory and a huge amount of active memory (not an unusually amount of inactive. Out of 12GB only a couple hundred Meg "free". I did a sort on the "real memory" column and to my surprise, the app that was eating the most memory was "TextEdit". TextEdit was running (minimized) and had a simple document open in it. When I quit TextEdit, my free memory greatly improved. Not sure why TextEdit would be eating up so much memory? I've never seen that before.