What's the deal with all this memory useage?

[nicolanicola]

I primarily use adobe's creative suite software on my mac. I have noticed it goes so slowly doing things in photoshop. In premiere pro it just crashes.

Even when no CS4 programs are open, there is still high memory usage.

Have a look at the attached image, less than 1GB available of 4GB when I am not using maybe a gig max with my programs.

It's a macbook pro 2.4 GHz I5 4GB ram.

Why is it using so much memory and how can I cut it down?

 

[osxx]

Your Firefox is consuming a lot do you have a lot of tabs open ?

 

[nicolanicola]

Your Firefox is consuming a lot do you have a lot of tabs open ?

Only 8. I always thought it used a lot too, so I switched to chrome. But I miss the plugins avilable for FF and prefer working with those.

 

[vansmith]

Only 8. I always thought it used a lot too, so I switched to chrome. But I miss the plugins avilable for FF and prefer working with those.

Which plugins do you need? You can probably get replacements (especially if they're popular).

You have more RAM available to you than you think. First up, you have ~ 950MB of free memory. Add to that the ~ 945MB of inactive memory. You can add this because inactive memory is memory that was allocated to a now closed application that if need be, can be used elsewhere. This is done to improve performance - if that application opens up later, it already has the RAM allocated for it. If you start to run low on free memory though, OS X will start taking back some of that inactive memory. Wired is "permanently" used so that won't count as usable memory. Finally, active memory is memory allocated to applications currently in use so that's also not going to count as available memory. So, if we do a little math, we can see that you have 1.85GB of memory available to you.

More info here.

 

[nicolanicola]

Ahh I see, ok thanks for the information. I've just found out that for £38 I can double my memory, so I'm going to do that. I had no idea it was so cheap and so easy!