Wired Memory in Lion

[Chippy99]

Recently I put 16GB of ram in my Mac Mini. To be honest it's not because I need 16GB, more because I could and well, I just fancied trying it.

Now I notice Lion is using 1.35GB!!! of wired memory. This is from cold boot, with nothing other than Safari and Activity Monitor loaded.

Is this normal? It seems a hell of a lot. Kernel_task is using 635MB (don't know if that comes under "wired"?) but even allowing for that I can't see how 1.35GB is being used up.

Is there any way to check what is using the wired memory - and whether or not it should be?

I have noticed the occasional disk thrashing and page out when doing Carbon Copy backups, which with 16GB of ram seems utterly ridiculous. I don't have any notoriously memory-heavy apps like Parallels or VMWare. Just normal stuff.

Any ideas?

 

[mulo]

wired memory is required by hardware, this will be desecrate graphics memory, thunderbolt controller etc.
and yes its perfectly normal. I'm running with 1.9GB wired right now on my MBP - see signature

Do note that the more memory you have in your machine, the more memory it will wire to your discrete graphics card etc to increase its performance.