Runaway RAM usage

Hi,

I recently upgraded the ram on my MacBook Pro 13" (Mid 2012) from 4GB to 8GB since it was running slow. It's only been a few days, and it's currently using almost all of that RAM. There are just a few applications open (Safari, Pages, Mail, Numbers, and Activity Monitor) and it's using 7.93GB of RAM.

I copied, pasted the RAM usage of processes from activity monitor into Numbers and calculated the total RAM usage, but can only account for 4.343GB of RAM. But the activity monitor claims 7.93GB of RAM is being used. I've scanned the activity monitor for suspicious processes checking them against a google search, but with no promising results. I'm thinking there might be a virus, or at least something mysterious happening to be sucking my RAM dry while I'm not doing anything. And, only 15% of the CPU is being used.

I've also tried scanning Console for fishy things to, but with no luck. Admittedly, I have no idea what to look for.

I've attached some screenshots of the RAM processes list. Also, under "View" I've set it to "All processes"

Please help! This is make me so nervous.

The number you need to worry about on that page is "Swap Used." It's zero. That's good. As for the rest, the fact that memory pressure is low also means that the system is working just fine. Don't sweat the memory, OS X manages memory very well.

Thanks for that fast reply, MacInWin. I'm still concerned, as it is a sign of an unhealthy computer to be using all of my memory when I'm doing almost nothing. I'd appreciate a second opinion from someone.

sealedkeyhole said:

Thanks for that fast reply, MacInWin. I'm still concerned, as it is a sign of an unhealthy computer to be using all of my memory when I'm doing almost nothing. I'd appreciate a second opinion from someone.

Click to expand...

I'm assuming that your computer is running at least OS 10.9 (Mavericks). Mavericks & later manages ram differently than previous OS versions. If you want to learn more…do an internet search for "Mavericks ram use".

- Nick

First and foremost, lets dispense with the myth that using ALL of your memory is a bad thing. This is far from the truth, you actually want all of the memory used up during normal usage.

Jake hit one of the two things you need to keep an eye on, i.e, Swap Used. This indicates the amount of contents that OS X had to move from RAM to your hard drive (SSD) to make space for an application. Usually things that are moved to hard drive from RAM will have to be moved back at some point and of this back-and-forth happens often, you're going to get whats known as "disk thrashing" and that will definitely affect overall system performance..

The second thing you want to look at is Wired Memory, this is an indication of how much memory CANNOT be swapped to disk and must remain in RAM. In your case, of the 8GB of RAM, less than 1GB is Wired which means that you are completely fine..

And as Nick said if using Mavericks or Yosemite that is the way it is supposed to work!