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What is killing my RAM on Leopard?

P

projectMECCA

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 6, 2007
20
0
Austin, Texas
When i had tiger, i remember that I would have at least 1.4gb of RAM free when i started my Macbook C2D 2GB RAM up. I have leopard now, and recently noticed that my ram is almost nothing when i start the computer. i dont think its leopard, but i can't figure out what it is. in this pic, i haven't even opened dashboard yet:

Picture2.png


Look, i only have 30mb of 2gb left and i have no apps open either! I know i have a gig of inactive, but even so, what made it go from free to inactive and why dont i at least have 1.3-1.4gb of RAM free when starting my computer?
 
youve only used 877.66 MB of ram (wired + active) and youve got 1.16 GB of ram free (inactive + free). inactive ram is ram thats currently reserved for recently used processors. its actually good to use up all your free ram so your apps will startup and be able to be used a lot faster.

as the above posters have suggested just ignore the ram usage. youve got 2 gigs of ram so thats more than enough for normal usage. you should only worry about your ram usage if the yellow section starts to take up the whole pie graph. if thats the case with your normal use you should probably invest in some more ram by this stage.
 
I understand that 1.2GB of RAM is ok for regular users, but i use Logic Studio (i love student discounts :) ) and that takes up so much RAM its unreal. I upgraded to Logic 8 recently and it was fine, but nowadays it slows down cause of my RAM usage from idle processes which i can't pinpoint. I dont think an operating system by itself should take up 877.66 MB of RAM before anything else even starts. I thought minimum requirements was 512 MB.
 
projectMECCA said:
I understand that 1.2GB of RAM is ok for regular users, but i use Logic Studio (i love student discounts :) ) and that takes up so much RAM its unreal. I upgraded to Logic 8 recently and it was fine, but nowadays it slows down cause of my RAM usage from idle processes which i can't pinpoint. I dont think an operating system by itself should take up 877.66 MB of RAM before anything else even starts. I thought minimum requirements was 512 MB.
Click to expand...

when that happen OSX will just move some of the active ram into page files. Nice thing about the paging is it can act like ram. A lot slower but still does the same time.
For example on my PC when I run BF2 which will eat up over 70% of my ram by it self. Windows will shove almost everything else into it page files. Now when I quite playing the game it does take a few mins before my computer is truly useable again as it takes time to move everything from the hard drive back to active ram. OSX would be the same.
 
I have the same issue here plus Safari just lagged on me twice so I open the Activity Monitor and there was about 32 MB free of 2GB Ram!!!!!!

I closed every application was working on (which btw is a couple!)

no big difference after that move

:\
 
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