07-14-2005, 03:35 AM

Hi

I noticed recently that half my Mini's Gb Ram appears to be in constant use. This has never been the case before. I have turned off everything in the dock yest is still indicates 483MB in use.

Any idea how I can track down the memory hogger?

Thanks

Tc

07-14-2005, 09:04 AM

Activity monitor or something

07-14-2005, 09:52 AM

Go into applications, open terminal, type the following command;

ps aux

07-14-2005, 09:52 AM

Have you activated a lot of widgets? They use up 5-10MB each...

But Activity monitor is a great place to look:

Applications>Utilities>Activity monitor.

07-14-2005, 12:37 PM

Mine uses about 680 MB when I'm on the desktop running Safari and iTunes. A lot of that is "inactive" memory. From what I hear, Tiger is memory intensive and that makes sense with widgets, spotlight, etc.

07-14-2005, 12:47 PM

make sure you dont have any widgets running on another user...

07-14-2005, 06:16 PM

So what exactly is inactive memory? I just check the activity monitor and total im using 602mb on my powerbook, but 330mb of that is inactive and only 170 is active. I dont have many things running, mostly widgets. With that much memory being used when I start to work in photoshop will it really bog my computer down? What can I do to help conserve more of my memory?

07-15-2005, 07:11 AM

Type in terminal:

top

07-15-2005, 05:23 PM

Originally Posted by PunkRockTuba

So what exactly is inactive memory? I just check the activity monitor and total im using 602mb on my powerbook, but 330mb of that is inactive and only 170 is active. I dont have many things running, mostly widgets. With that much memory being used when I start to work in photoshop will it really bog my computer down? What can I do to help conserve more of my memory?

I think inactive memory is just memory that isn't being used but has been previously, free memory is memory that hasn't been used yet.

Think of it this way, load an app like iTunes and the first time memory is allocated from the free pool, quit the app and the memory is put in the inactive pool, start it up again and rather than start from scratch with free memory the old memory is re-used.

(it doesn't work exactly like that as only certain memory will be useful but it does work that way for things like files, the second time you open it will be much faster)

So basically inactive memory is sort of free memory it is just being held back by the OS to help performance just like a super sized cache.

Amen-Moses

(windoze does the same thing btw, they just call it a file cache)

07-15-2005, 11:59 PM

that was a good for soemone who has no idea what it was doing to learn, like me.

07-18-2005, 08:26 PM

Originally Posted by zap2

that was a good for soemone who has no idea what it was doing to learn, like me.

I noticed that you have an iMac G5 and wondered if you had any problems with freezing, crashing, etc. I purchased mine 3 weeks ago and have completely started from scratch, initializing the HD and reinstalling from the Apple disc. My machine came with 10.3 and I upgraded to 10.4.2. The only programs I have loaded are Photoshop CS and MS Office. Any ideas why it continues to crash whether I'm on the internet or working images in Photoshop?

07-18-2005, 08:51 PM

Originally Posted by TangoCharlie

Hi

I noticed recently that half my Mini's Gb Ram appears to be in constant use. This has never been the case before. I have turned off everything in the dock yest is still indicates 483MB in use.

Any idea how I can track down the memory hogger?

Thanks

Tc

Most likely you are simply seeing OS X caching a lot of items into available memory. OSes will do this to speed up frequently-accessed items from disk. High memory utilization is just the OS being efficient and can be ignored, as long as it's not accompanied by swap (virtual) memory usage.