why does the "Free Ram" constantly go down?

[WillMak]

when I go to activity monitor, the free ram is constantly going down. I had 1.01 Ram free, but now it says i only have 33 megabytes left (this is after leaving my ibook on for about 5 hours) and its still going down!!!

Edit: Wow that's strange, now some of the "inactive RAm" (I have 987 MB of it as inactive!!!) is going down and the "Free" Ram number is going back up a little bit...It also seems like my virtual memory is conastnatly going up as well.

 

[chucknorris]

when I go to activity monitor, the free ram is constantly going down. I had 1.01 Ram free, but now it says i only have 33 megabytes left (this is after leaving my ibook on for about 5 hours) and its still going down!!!

Edit: Wow that's strange, now some of the "inactive RAm" (I have 987 MB of it as inactive!!!) is going down and the "Free" Ram number is going back up a little bit...It also seems like my virtual memory is conastnatly going up as well.

Sounds like a memory leak to me. Look at the open applications in activity monitor to see if one is using a whole lot of vm or cpu or ram. This is likely the problem. For me, Firefox does this after freezing.

 

[WillMak]

Sounds like a memory leak to me. Look at the open applications in activity monitor to see if one is using a whole lot of vm or cpu or ram. This is likely the problem. For me, Firefox does this after freezing.

I checked the activity monitor and everything seems normal. However, I came across this on google: http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2003/03/20030303131234.shtml

Which says that mac OSX likes to take Free memory and turn it into "inactive memory" or something. I don't know what to believe.

 

[chucknorris]

I checked the activity monitor and everything seems normal. However, I came across this on google: http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2003/03/20030303131234.shtml

Which says that mac OSX likes to take Free memory and turn it into "inactive memory" or something. I don't know what to believe.

Very interesting, and convincing. I would say that sounds right, but we both might want to wait until somebody more os x savvy responds...

 

[Chundles]

Safari does this on mine - starts off at about 13MB and ends up at around 90MB after an hour or two.

Don't know why and I can't figure out how to stop it.

 

[ITASOR]

To my understanding, OS X will start using inactive RAM if there's no RAM left. To try this, wait until you have only a few MB's of RAM and a ton of inactive RAM and start opening apps like CRAZY.

 

[WillMak]

To my understanding, OS X will start using inactive RAM if there's no RAM left. To try this, wait until you have only a few MB's of RAM and a ton of inactive RAM and start opening apps like CRAZY.

That's good to know. I have like almost a gig of inactive RAM. Do you guys notice your free RAm dropping nd inactive ram rising as well?

 

[cblackburn]

when I go to activity monitor, the free ram is constantly going down. I had 1.01 Ram free, but now it says i only have 33 megabytes left (this is after leaving my ibook on for about 5 hours) and its still going down!!!

Edit: Wow that's strange, now some of the "inactive RAm" (I have 987 MB of it as inactive!!!) is going down and the "Free" Ram number is going back up a little bit...It also seems like my virtual memory is conastnatly going up as well.

This is absolutely normal, and it shows that Mac OS X is doing it's job. Mac OS X gets its speed by using a very aggressive cacheing scheme so that any spare memory that is free is used to store copies of commonly accessed files in memory so when the system needs them it can access them very quickly.

Chris

 

[MisterMe]

This is absolutely normal, and it shows that Mac OS X is doing it's job. Mac OS X gets its speed by using a very aggressive cacheing scheme so that any spare memory that is free is used to store copies of commonly accessed files in memory so when the system needs them it can access them very quickly.

Chris

This correct. The concern about the disappearance of free RAM is a mistaken holdover of MacOS 9 and Windows/DOS thinking. Free RAM is wasted RAM.