Something's Using All My RAM

I don't know what it is. I'm running Snow Leopard on a 2009 iMac with 8GB of RAM. I use the Free Memory app which tells me how much RAM I have free on my menu. After a few hours of use basically all RAM is used. I left my Mac on today when I went out for a few hours, came back and only 17MB of RAM was free. I only had a couple of Apps like Safari and uTorrent running, both of which in the activity monitor were only taking up between 100MB-200MB each. There was nothing else in the activity monitor that indicated anything using a lot of RAM, so what could it be? Using Free Memory I was able to free over 4GB, but what is using it in the first place? Is there anyway I can find out?

In Activity Montior, click on the Memory tab on the bottom and tell us what you see what Free, Wired, Active, Inactive and Used memory..

The Free memory is not really a realistic representation of free memory, it's the wired and active that better tell you what's going on..inactive is like free and can be used by any application..

Having the free pool go down to 0 in one way is the right thing to happen..

At the minute I'm sitting with 59MB free according to Free Memory. According to Activity Monitor:

Free: 54.9 MB

Wired: 773.4 MB

Active: 2.41 GB

Inactive: 4.79 GB

Used: 7.96 GB

Is this normal? Why would so much be inactive?

Syze said:

Why would so much be inactive?

Click to expand...

"Inactive" ram is not a problem:

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

- Nick

You're perfectly fine..apart from reading the link that Nick pointed to..Wired and Active memory is what is currently in use, and inactive is memory that was in use but is no longer in use and can be used by other applications. So you should really look at Inactive and Free together to get an idea of how much memory you will have available for applications..

In your case, that's just over 4.8GB of the 8GB total..and that's over 50% and that's fine..

Thanks very much for the replies.