Dosen't let go of inactive RAM.

I have 8 Gs of RAM but it seems to latch on and not let it go. I have a lot of inactive RAM. Why dosen't it free up when I close whatever RAM hog I was using (a video, iPhoto, etc.)?
Right now I have 8 Tabs. I've messed around with iPhoto and watched a few videos, but they are now closed. 3G active, 3G inactive 1 wired, 1 free. As the day goes on, the free RAM diminishes. I don't get the beach ball of death, so it really isn't slowing this thing down, but I'm just curious what the thinking is. As I understand it, the iPhoto and the vid (as examples) are waiting in the wings incase I want to use it again, for faster access; is this the case?.

Dont worry too much about memory management in OSX. If active RAM is needed by a new application it will be freed up.

Generally OSX seems to use up a lot of RAM, but its just trying to be efficient, but it will allocate more RAM to actively running applications as and when they need it.

Free RAM is just the amount of RAM that has not yet been used by anything, so is not an accurate guide to how much RAM is available to newly launched apps

dotdotdot said:

I have 8 Gs of RAM but it seems to latch on and not let it go. I have a lot of inactive RAM. Why dosen't it free up when I close whatever RAM hog I was using (a video, iPhoto, etc.)?

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This is the way it works. Ram that was used for an application that was just closed...then becomes inactive ram. For the purposes of this post..."free ram" and "inactive ram" are the same thing. All of this ram is available for any application that needs it.

- Nick

Read this. In short, read inactive memory as free memory.

EDIT: Ahh! Beaten to the keyboard by Nick.

vansmith said:

EDIT: Ahh! Beaten to the keyboard by Nick.

Click to expand...

Hey...the best thing is we're in agreement!

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

Hey...the best thing is we're in agreement!

Click to expand...

Hmmm....no, inactive memory is the worst thing ever!

All joking aside, Nick is very much correct. Inactive memory is memory that was in use and is allocated but if need be, can be reallocated at a moment's notice.