Wired Memory in Lion

Discussion in 'Mac OS X Lion (10.7)' started by Chippy99, May 13, 2012.

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  1. Chippy99, May 13, 2012

    Chippy99 macrumors 6502a

    Joined:
    Apr 28, 2012
    #1
    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?
     
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  2. mulo, May 13, 2012
    Last edited: May 13, 2012

    mulo macrumors 68020

    mulo

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2010
    Location:
    Behind you
    #2
    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.
     
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