watching mac activity monitor

Awhile back, my macbook pro shutdown unexpectedly (or maybe just restarted....I can't remember) a couple of times, and it caused me to lose whatever work I was doing that I hadn't saved yet. It was suggested to me that I should keep on eye on my activity monitor (which I had never even opened before), and should shut down/restart my computer more often, which I was practically never doing back then. I haven't had this problem occur since that time because I've been shutting down my computer occasionally and restarting it quite often (I actually restart it just about whenever the green space on the activity monitor pie chart looks like it is less than 1/4th of the chart). I'm bringing all this up because I feel like maybe I'm overdoing it with monitoring this and being a bit worried all the time that my computer is going to unexpectedly restart and I'll lose all of my work (which, like I said, hasn't happened in a really long time since I used to not monitor this at all). Am I in danger of overloading my system just because that green space starts to become a small portion of the pie chart....or is this not the best indicator? I guess I'm just wondering if I'm being too uptight about this and don't have that much to worry about as long as I'm restarting my computer at least occasionally......? I just don't want to have to redo any work like I did those couple of times! (and yes, I do save my work while I'm doing it, but I can't be constantly saving it)........Any advice other than this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

What version of OS X are you running?

How much RAM do you have? Would upgrade this to start with.

I use "Free Memory" - it's free in the Mac App Store or you can upgrade to the Pro version for a whole dollar.

What app is eating your RAM - you could quit and reopen that particular app once in awhile instead of rebooting.
Ex. My machine was running slow yesterday and I quit Firefox. Went from 13 MB free memory to 2.59 GB free.

activity monitor response

My computer says I have 6 items, 111.87 GB available hard drive space (used 137.84 GB out of 249.72 GB capacity). Is this what you are referring to when you are talking about getting RAM?....and does increasing this capacity have much to do with how quickly the activity monitor fills up?
Or does hard drive space mean something different than memory?
I'm guessing that I could also probably free up a lot of space by storing a bunch of 'home movie' videos (that I intend on editing in iMovie at a later date) on a flash drive instead of my computer.
In general, I assume I'm not doing too badly if I've only used a bit more than half of my available capacity....but once when I tried to install the mac mail program, it said that "Mail Update can't be installed on this disk. (Macintosh HD) This volume does not meet the requirements for this update." Does this mean I need to free up space to install this program?
(It looks like I am running version 10.6.8 of OS X).

No, you are talking about storage or hard drive space, Bobtomay was asking about RAM. When you open up Activity Monitor, toward the bottom there will be a series of buttons like CPU, System Memory, Disk Actiity and so on..

You want to click on the System Memory which will give you the pie chart you are talking about and also give you information about Wired, Active, Inactive and Used memory amount. Tell us what those numbers look like and we'll go from there..

P.S., please try to use some paragraphs when you post, reading a big block of text is tough..

numbers

Free: 1.87 GB
Wired: 583.4 MB
Active: 1.02 GB
Inactive: 553.6 MB
Used: 2.13 GB

Yep, that's what we were looking for.

You are probably overdoing keeping track with Activity Monitor.

The app I linked to above keeps your current free memory on the menu bar for a quick look so you're not having to stop what you're doing and bring up another app.

A quick click on it and it'll free up additional memory for you also. Plus, you'll be able to know when to look at Activity monitor as the memory gets low in order to check what app is being a hog.

I notice my machine start slowing down when I hit about 350MB free. And I don't pay attention to it until I notice some slow down.

I use some browser extensions that eat memory like there is no tomorrow and eventually I need to reboot because of them - but still don't think I re-boot but "maybe" once a week.

reply

Thanks for the advice....I will take a look at that FreeMemory app....although I already keep the activity monitor at the bottom of the screen so I'm not sure if that app would do much more for me in terms of monitoring usage.
It'd be nice if the activity monitor (or something else) could pop up a warning on the screen when your available green space (free space) starts to get low....I am probably over-monitoring it because I'm worried I'll forget to look down at it and it'll restart my computer.

I guess this is sort of an unrelated question....but I referred earlier to that message I was receiving when I try to install the mac mail app. Could this have anything to do with the available hard drive space?

Would have nothing to do with free space.

Don't know where you would be installing 'Mail' from though as it's a standard part of the OS installation.

My guess, you were trying to install an update from somewhere other than 'Software Update' and that it was not applicable to the version of OS X you are running.