Unknown use of ram slowing down my mac?

[1080Griz]

About 2 years ago I bought a 2011 IMac with 4GB of ram and 500g hardrive. It has been working perfectly until about 2-3 months ago. Before, I could play World of Warcraft on with the settings on good and pull 60fps in a 25 man raid group. I could load up chrome in seconds and open up pages fast as well. Now, I pull 1-3 fps in raids (at the start at least), takes 30 seconds to open up chrome, even longer to open up a website or new tab on it, and pages takes minutes to open up. As I said earlier, this has been going on for months. As a side note, in the past I would run into issues of a full hardrive, and my computer would slow down a tad bit, but now I have 369 GB out of 500 GB of unused space and it is infinitely slower.

I have tried many things to speed up my computer but none seem to work. Today I saw some article about what could slow down your mac and it showed how to check your ram, and explained how virtual memory slowed your computer down. So I looked at my ram and was baffled
It says I am using 4 out of 4 GB of physical memory along with another 6.47 of Virtual memory. If you look closely, all of the applications on the page don't even add up to 2 GB of memory (there are more not shown but they are less than 2 MB each).

My question is, where is my ram going, and is this what is causing my mac to slow down? Thank you for your help.

 

[pigoo3]

From what I'm reading…I'm going to guess that you don't reboot your computer very often. I would say you need to restart your computer…because the Swap File & Page-Outs are getting too large. This happens when the:

- computer is run for a long time without restarting occasionally
- can happen faster with less installed ram
- and I think that it also is accelerated with a lot of online gaming (which I do almost daily)

The MacBook Pro I'm using has 4gig of installed ram (just like your iMac)…and if I'm doing a lot of online gaming…I need to restart/reboot my computer at least weekly…and sometimes more often.

HTH,

- Nick

p.s. FYI…restarting/rebooting the computer "resets" the Swap file and Page-Outs size to zero.

 

[johnodd4]

but if your running yosemite you need to understand something clearly.

Yosemite uses different ram options depending on what model of mac you have like my mac pro uses 4 gig's of ram with yosemite while my parents macbook air only uses 2 gig's of ram to run yosemite

 

[harryb2448]

4GB of memory is a little bit lean. Double to 8GB at least to see an improvement. It is possible to run up to 32GB.


Memory up to 32GB for Apple iMac 2011 Thunderbolt equipped models

 

[dotdotdot]

It says I am using 4 out of 4 GB of physical memory along with another 6.47 of Virtual memory.

That's odd. We have the same computer, but my virtual and physical numbers match (8).
However, I never break through the 8 G barrier, so it could be reason we have differing stats.

Maybe you meant swap.