what's eatin up my memory?

[orgazmatron]

hey guys!
i've been roaming this forum for some time and i have found a lot of useful tips for my mac.

now i have a question which i think is specific for my mac.

i have a late 2008 macbook pro. i reacently changed my ram memory from 2gb to 4gb. i bought crucial and everything is rolling fine.

the reason why i bought the extra memory is because i play starcraft 2 and my mac was struggling when loading and with other ingame things (fps, loading armies...). also ffox was choking all the time and my mac was generally becoming slow.

the day i bought the memory it all went smooth. the wired part took up the usual part as when i had 2gb (round 15% when i had 2gb and with 4gb round 9%). starcraft was also running smooth on 30fps and didn't lag or cut in game.

then my friend asked me to borrow my laptop cause he has to do some programing in xcode. and i did. now my mac is back and the memory is acting a bit weird. the wired part now takes 15% of the memory again. the used memory is 1.8 gb now when i'm only running ffox, adium and itunes. ffox is taking only 130 mb of memory at the moment. also starcraft is back to it's ****** 18 fps and cutting and lagging from time to time. also the loading time is not as long as it was with 2gb but obviously slower.

i don't know on what or who to blame this. could this be because the xcode and all the programing took 10gb of my hard drive, or do u think my friend could mess something up while programing? he and i also messed with ffox to limit its memory usage...

also why is kernel taking up so much memory?

please guys help!
i'm starting to be very pissed cause i keep on losing in starcraft because of this ****... ((

here's some images attached to cover the post.

p.s. i'm obviously not experienced with memory and all the hardware

 

[Hellhammer]

Have you tried a simple reboot? That resets your RAM etc so the system should be back as it was. You have over 2GB of free RAM so RAM should not be the issue. Maybe a (clean) reinstall of OS X will help, it did for me

 

[aimbdd]

1. Try restarting if computer has been left running this whole time.
2.Try OnyX, running the cleanup and maintenance on there should help greatly with ram use. I know it helped me at least.
3. We would need to see activity monitor screenshot with sc running, and whatever you have open while playing
I have 6 gb and my free memory went down to 1 gb leaving my computer running for a week or two straight. Really should restart every day or two.

 

[orgazmatron]

did rebooting and i also turn of ffox when i play to minimize ram usage. i also repaired all the disk permissions.

i was thinking about the clean reinstall of osx but dunno how and dont know what to save...

gonna try onyx, could u give me the links?

here's activity with skype and sc2. it (sc2) usually runs at 1.3gb.

 

[Hellhammer]

OnyX

I didn't do a clean install, just a normal install thus all my data remained the same. It did fix my problems though

 

[aimbdd]

It looks like your just doing to much for 4 gb of ram.
Clean instal will help. The link will too. See if that helps first, a lot less effort. Clean instal second. otherwise, if those don't help, its just not enough memory to run all those things at the same time.

 

[mulo]

Also, typing purge in terminal will clear your ram up pretty good, but it will make everything lag for ~20 secs

 

[orgazmatron]

kk

so

how do i do the clean install or normal install?

if i type purge, it will lag 4 how long?

as i said, when i run sc2 i just run it and itunes and some chat program (adioum or skype)

 

[orgazmatron]

i can see threads get eaten up quickly here, so can i get the answers fro mmy previous post please?