iMac Memory

[JeffL]

In activity Monitor on my iMac the following is displayed. Physical Memory: 8.00GB, Memory Used: 4.16GB, Cached Files: 3.80GB. Or another time it might be Memory Used: 5.25GB, Cached Files: 2.73GB. I noticed that the two figures added together don't appear to exceed the 8.00GB total memory capacity. So does that mean that the two figures added together are using up virtually all of my 8.00GB memory capacity? If the answer is yes, do I need more memory?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

The Memory Used is all you should be looking at in relation to your system memory, the cached and swap are different. For the Memory Used, the three pieces App, Wired and Compressed will add up to whatever value you have. The key one is Wired, if that is very high, then you have applications that are hogging memory and that will have an adverse reaction on other apps. App Memory is reusable memory that can shared by all the apps and Compressed is whatever memory has been compressed because it hasn't been used for a while but, for some reason, needs to be accessible in memory.

My machine has 16GB of memory and Memory Used is 11.86, of which only 2.79GB is Wired. So I am not running to the memory ceiling.

 

[JeffL]

Raz0rEdge thank you for the explanation.