Ok i have an early 2009 imac cd2 2.66ghz 4gb ram. Each time i look at my activity monitor it always shows around 150-350mb ram free while i have Mail, Itunes, and Safari open. Why? its not like im using any intense apps
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Why does my mac use soo much ram?
- Thread starter Micjose
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Same here, I have a 27" late '09 core 2 duo iMac, and last time I checked the activity monitor, it was using a ton just when I had Safari open...I don't know why that's the case...
plinden
macrumors 601
Are you looking at only free (the green) or combining free and inactive?
Inactive is also free, it's just still allocated to applications that used it in case you want to restart them, but will be allocated to newly started applications if free goes to zero.
That's why eg. Word is faster to open on subsequent launches than the first time. The second time, the RAM is already allocated. Eventually, that RAM will be used for other applications so the OS will have allocate RAM to it again and launch time will increase.
Remember, unused RAM is wasted RAM.
Inactive is also free, it's just still allocated to applications that used it in case you want to restart them, but will be allocated to newly started applications if free goes to zero.
That's why eg. Word is faster to open on subsequent launches than the first time. The second time, the RAM is already allocated. Eventually, that RAM will be used for other applications so the OS will have allocate RAM to it again and launch time will increase.
Remember, unused RAM is wasted RAM.
Yes i was..
Oh ok i didn't know. I was just looking at the green. Inactive shows 1gb. Isn't that still pretty low?
plinden
macrumors 601
plinden
macrumors 601
Page outs are when the OS needs to write RAM contents to disk when RAM usage is getting too high. If the Page In/out ratio is high (like yours is) your memory usage is ok.
OS X memory management isn't perfect, but it usually gets a good balance between usage and performance.
If you're not seeing any slowdowns and your page outs are low, you shouldn't worry about it.
OS X memory management isn't perfect, but it usually gets a good balance between usage and performance.
If you're not seeing any slowdowns and your page outs are low, you shouldn't worry about it.
