What is taking up all my RAM?

[Oolongmen]

I'm not running anything besides MSN, iTunes, and FF (i closed this for the screenshot) and a few background apps... but my RAM usage is close to 2.8GB out of 4GB. What gives?

 

[soms]

Whats the up time on it? Sometimes on mine if I leave it on for a couple days and use a ton of programs it will keep them in ram even if they aren't active, I guess so they load faster next time I use them. Try a restart an see if that fixes it.

 

[scienide09]

I don't know the terminology too well, but I've seen this discussed before. Basically, OS X will use the RAM if it's available before accessing the swap space(?) on the hard drive. The more RAM available, the more it will be used by the operating system.

 

[Oolongmen]

it's been up for 1~2 days
of course restarting would fix it, but are there better solutions?

AFAIK OS X doesn't have Superfetch like windows, and even Vista only uses 1.5~2GB max on a 4GB setup with Superfetch running, and it gives the memory to any big programs I might be running. Right now OS X is just taking up the RAM for no apparent reason and even using my swap file (which slows down the computer) while running almost no apps...

 

[Latro]

check out this article on slow Macs and how to fix them.

not sure if this is the problem, but may be related to your high memory usage.