Just curious

[nikki]

Hi,
I'm just wondering why the Activity Monitor shows the System Memory as Shown,

Wired; 146.86 MB
Active; 167.31 MB
Inactive; 812.33 MB
Used ; 1.10 GB
Free; 409.50
VM size; 6.70 GB
Page ins/outs; 78574/174

I have 1.5 gigs of ram and all I have is 409.50 MB of free, I have nothing open. I did have a bunch of stuff open before, but closed everything, is this normal with OSX.



 

[Stef]

Hi Nikki!

I was just wondering about the same, but didn't get around posting the question about it! I don't understand it as well... When you start & close apps you will notice differences in those readings, but it looks like they will not go to 'zero', well they never will because the OS will use an amount of RAM of course... Anyway, you will see the amount of RAM dropped to this 'OS usage' when you restart the computer...
What I perticularly like to know about is the 'inactive' (ram) part, what is this, used or what?

Greetz, Stef

[kelly]

Off hand.  I'd say OS X will take as much as it can get. It's not hurting anything.

Some explanations here.

"PhysMem is just that -- physical memory -- your installed RAM.  
 
 1. Wired = memory allocated that shouldn't/can't be swapped/paged out (ie its locked into memory -- possibly portions of the OS code for example).  
 
 2. Active = allocated memory that has been accessed during last N seconds.  
 
 3. Inactive = allocated memory that hasn't been accessed during last N Secs (quite likely to be forst candidates for being swapped/paged out if memory being demanded).  
 
 4. Used = Wired + Active + Inactive  
 
 5. Free = memory that isn't allocated to any process or the kernel.  
 
 6. VM = Virtual Memory ( a fictictous amount of memory that represents a processes upper potential limit for its memory allocation or requirements -- very raely ever requested). I'm not sure what the + 44.0M represents."

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?sto...010613140025184

Open the Terminal, in Applications > Utilities and type top

http://www.resexcellence.com/hack_html_01/.../01-17-01.shtml

More.

How much RAM is enough?

http://www.macdesignonline.com/issues/mayj...un03/DrMac.html

[Stef]

Hi Kelly, thanx for the response! And now my head's buzzin' from the information in that 'MacOSXhints' article; Kernel, Page in/out, swapfile... Hmm, more cos I just experimented with OnyX, a free maintenance program and it adressed system-files etc. I didn't know what I was doing (and I was alarmed by an old saying: If it's not broke, don't fix it!) But I wanted to fool around, learning curve..., Everything went okay, more or less I guess, but I meddled with swapfiles... And I just read that I better could leave 'm alone... Well, we'll see I suppose! But! Another 256 mB chipset is on its way! Getting close to 1 G now... Ohh, I found out that the logging in is 'controlled' by Cookies?.... After the cache clean-up I was logged-out! Hihi

Greetz, Stef