Where is all my memory?

[Ja Di ksw]

I'm curious as to what exactly drains so much memory. I have 8GB of RAM, and when I'm not running anything (except a couple things in the menubar and, of course, Finder), I only have 5.47GB free. I opened Activity monitor, and aside from Kernel_task (779.6MB) nothing had more than 250MB and most things less than 50MB. Even adding up what I saw there it didn't top 2GB of usage. So why is my computer "using" over 3.5GB when no app is running?

 

[MacDawg]

Can you post a screen shot of your Activity Monitor?

 

[Ja Di ksw]

Yup

 

[715243]

I'm curious as to what exactly drains so much memory. I have 8GB of RAM, and when I'm not running anything (except a couple things in the menubar and, of course, Finder), I only have 5.47GB free.

Mac OS/X, like Linux, tries to use free RAM to cache files and whatnot, to reduce the need to access the hard drive. If you want to release all of that cached data, go to the Terminal and type purge.