RAM constantly dropping

I've had my macbook pro for about a year, and just for the last week or so I've been having this problem. I have 8gb RAM, and it's always been the case that I have about 4gb free. But recently, it just keeps dropping slowly but non stop until it's all the way down. I use a RAM cleaner (icleanmemory), and it brings back about 200mb, but it just drops right back. When I check Activity Monitor, it says a lot of it can be accounted for by Chrome, which has like 10 different renderers sucking up ~30mb each, so I restart chrome and pretty much right away it starts to dip again. Any ideas what this might be? Thanks for any help, much appreciated.

What happens if you use Safari instead of Chrome? I was a heavy Chrome user with many tabs open and found that it leaked a lot more memory over a period of time than FireFox or Safari. I currently gave up using Chrome and am using FireFox with the same configuration with no problems.

Bill

Memory usage, consumption, reclamation and re-use tends to be a point of confusion for a lot of people. Having Free memory drop to a low number while Inactive stays high doesn't really mean you are running out of memory.

As a current snapshot, my machine has been up for just over 7 days now and my memory is like the following:

Total - 12 GB
Free - 5.56GB
Wired - 1.19 GB
Active - 4.20 GB
Inactive - 1.04 GB
Used - 6.43 GB

Page Outs: 0 bytes

So I have ample memory for many applications to work with, and as they use and release memory, the Free pool will decrease, but the Inactive pool will increase and any application that needs memory will be able to access it from the Inactive pool. I need to start worrying if my Wired and Active memory pools increase to a point where basically all of my 12GB is being held, at this point in time I'm going to start paging out to the disk for every subsequent memory need and this will in turn lower my system performance.

Chrome works differently from other browsers in that each tab that is opened is a separate thread with it's own sandboxed memory. This allows for a good amount of separation and the ability to kill a single hung/broken/misbehaving tab without having to take down the entire application and other tabs. On the flip side, the ease of tabs and things that run in them means that Chrome tends to have a fairly high memory footprint.

You could alleviate some of that by closing out tabs that are no long of interest to you, especially ones that are running anything Flash related since that's gong to be a double wammy for that tab/thread..

The way to get memory back into the Inactive and eventually Free pools is to kill applications that are no longer needed. I'm not sure how a program like icleanmemory can regain memory held by application that are running..