abeas wrote:
Just wondering where almost a gig of ram is going and if this is normal.
What does *Activity Monitor > System Memory* say?
If the "Wired" + "Active" segments aren't growing mysteriously, there's no
reason for concern.
Be aware that "Inactive" memory is essentially the same as "Free" memory,
except that the OS happens to "know" what it contains -- so it need not
be re-fetched from disk if some app asks for it. As long as the memory
would otherwise be idle, it costs nothing to keep the the data handy --
but only until some process has a better use for the memory space.
For example, if I power-up my iMac and run an app that reads a 1GB file
from disk, it takes 15-20 seconds to fetch the data. However, if I close
the app, and then immediately re-run it, the second "read" of the same
data file takes less than half a second -- because the OS "remembered"
that the file contents were already in "inactive" memory.
OTOH, if I load/run a bunch of other apps that need that memory space,
the OS "forgets" the old data and allocates memory from the "inactive"
pool -- in exactly the same way that it would allocate "free" memory.
...unix is your friend,
Looby