Yosemite not using all available RAM since 10.10.3?

[Putyouinmyoven]

Hey, I got a new MacBook Pro 13" 2015 with 16GB RAM a couple of weeks ago and updated to 10.10.3 yesterday.

I've been on the computer a couple hours after restarting it, and this is what my memory tab on activity monitor:


I'm fairly sure that before the update, the memory used was generally around 16GB or a bit under, but it seems to not be getting over 8GB now - is this a problem? I'm concerned the computer is not using all of the RAM available to it. I'm not sure if the computer is more sluggish since the update or not; I suspect it might be getting more stuttery on complex websites with video etc. but I can't really objectively tell.

Thanks

 

[GGJstudios]

Your memory pressure graph is still green, which means you have RAM available. You don't need to worry about your memory management until the graph shows yellow or red under normal workloads. OS X will manage memory efficiently without user involvement.

 

[Weaselboy]

I'm fairly sure that before the update, the memory used was generally around 16GB or a bit under, but it seems to not be getting over 8GB now - is this a problem?

I think you are fine. I noticed the same thing with 10.10.3. I have 8GB of memory and normally close to 7GB would be used under 10.10.2.

Now under 10.10.3 with the same apps after a few hours use it is still sitting at about 4GB used. So something does appear to have changed with the way 10.10.3 manages, or at least reports memory usage. I think they may not be including that cached memory amount in memory used now, and that is why it appears to be using less.

 

[GGJstudios]

According to this article:

How to use Activity Monitor

Cached Files: Memory that was recently used by apps and is now available for use by other apps. For example, if you've been using Mail and then quit Mail, the RAM that Mail was using becomes part of the memory used by cached files, which then becomes available to other apps. If you open Mail again before its cached-files memory is used (overwritten) by another app, Mail opens more quickly because that memory is quickly converted back to app memory without having to load its contents from your startup drive.