S-l-o-w-w-w - High Memory usage?

Greetings

Over the recent past I've found my iMac getting slower. Dreaded beachball and apps slow to open, all that stuff.

I ran up Activity Monitor to try to figure out what is going on. The memory usage seems extremely high. 1.96 of the 2.00 Gig that I have installed. One by one, I closed down various apps to see if there was any effect. The most significant result was when I emptied the trash. Does the trash demand memory use? Today it's back to where you see it on the attached pic.



Any ideas what I should try next?

Thanks Mitcherooney

First thing I'd do is upgrade the amount of memory in the machine since you're running Windows in a VM. 2GB is just not much in this day and age when you add running a VM into the mix and dedicate 1/4 to 1/2 of it to the VM.

There's nothing else there that I see as overly high usage.



If emptying your trash seemed to help, my other question would be, how much free space do you have on that partition?

Having your hard disk crammed to its maximal capacity will inevitably slow down your computer. Emptying your trash probably gave your computer some welcome breathing room, so to speak. I suggest leaving at least 5-10 Gb of empty space on each individual machine.

Thanks for your replies.

Max memory on the iMac that I have (circa 2006) is 2 Gb.

I have 22 Gb free space on the Mac side of things and 52 Gb on the VM.

Closing down the VM reduced the disk usage to 1.19 Gb.

This slowdown of performance is fairly recent. Is the OS Snow Leopard (installed in January) particularly memory hungry? the problem of going slow wasn't apparent under Tiger. I don't want to go back to that unless I'm forced to....?

Cheers M