Snow Leopard ate my ram!

Hey there! Hoping this upgrade would make my MacBook Pro lighter and faster, I went for the leopard under snow.

Thing is, after I've installed it... well, yeah, it does boot and shuts down faster, I generally like it, but I no longer have such thing called RAM! I always have around 500 MB inactive RAM that never goes down, and Photoshop gets stuck when I open two files of around 100 MB each (I work with Photoshop, can't help it...). Usually I could have Photoshop eating up to 1 GB of my RAM if I wanted to. Now I can't have multiple files per session (I have to actually quit photoshop then open it again to open another file, because it doesn't frees space - never did - and now with Snow that problem got worse).

I have 2 GB of RAM, currently with Photoshop CS 4, Safari, Mail and Skype running and have 31 MB free, 517 MB inactive, 1.01 GB Active and 465 MB Wired. Plus my apps take forever to load because snow leopard won't free more than 10 MB when it gets short, it wants to preserve that 500 MB of inactive RAM!!! T_T Snow lets my apps die before they touch that ram.

Don't make me talk what happens when I click New Tab at Safari xD that's like rendering a Pixart movie scene xD.

Any way to tell Snow "HEY, LET GO A LITTLE BIT MORE, SYSTEM CAN'T GO UNDER 100 MB OF FREE RAM!"?

Help T_T

Thanks!

I'd say there's something wrong on your system -

First off, if I were you, I'd read:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/93819-basic-os-x-mac-troubleshooting.html

then I would probably try several of the things in there, including doing a hardware test if those suggestions didn't work.

I see my free/inactive/active ram shift a lot as I use my software and launch additional programs (this on my MB, 2gig ram) so something is hinky on your system.

I would follow Nehfel's advice and perform the basic troubleshooting techinques.

I do not thing that your issue is related to the system's memory management. f you are expeirencing slowdowns, there is most likely some other cause. For example, how much free disk space do you have?

Hi. I agree. I think the system's RAM management is fine and would assume another issue is the cause here. I've got a 2GHz aluminum MacBook with 2GB of RAM. With the 9400M, a minimum of 256MB of the system RAM is set aside for graphics use at any one time, so really I'm working with 1.75GB RAM. Right now I've got 186MB wired, 880MB active, 348MB inactive, and 378MB free. I'm not running much just adium, Safari, itunes, mail, Quicksilver, istat menus and last.fm, but my computer has been on for several days also, and I still have free RAM that isn't just inactive. I was editing about 16 tracks of audio in Garage Band the other day... no restart, and my computer is spry.

So, I'd check out other issues mentioned, like free disk space. That will always slow things down a lot. Clean up your hard drive. Delete/uninstall apps that you haven't used in months, get rid of other junk you don't use. If this doesn't leave you with at least 1/5 (I prefer 1/4 to be safe) of your boot drive's capacity free, then you need to invest in an external drive to carry your files around with you, or getting a bigger hard disk for your machine.

Hi, yeah, I've performed some of those "fixes"; so far... dunno, inactive memory is 200 MB lower, that feels nice xP Maybe cleaning the cache did the trick.

Attaching a screenshot from Activity Monitor!

I keep things tight, I come from Linux Debian and I'm used to all the "checking whats unused" part =P I still feel OS X is hiding something from me Linux didn't =P well OS X is also a more robust OS than Debian or Ubuntu are.

I've cleaned my cache and repaired disk permissions, beside the obvious stuff.

May resetting the PRAM do the trick?

Again, I'm just curious how can Photoshop just die before asking for any RAM! =(

Anyway, does my Activity Monitor look all right?

Cheers!

What PS are you running? There have been reports of problems running CS and CS2 because they must run in Rosetta. CS3 supposedly has some smaller problems also, but I've never run into any problems with it.

I'm using Photoshop CS 4...

anyway, does my activity monitor look okay?

Yea, Activity Monitor looks fine.