Clear inactive memory

I have 2 gigs of ram in my old desktop G5 and I'm running Final Cut Pro. My Activity Monitor is showing 1.44GB inactive and only 23.20mb Free. 428.88 MB is Active.

I understand that the Inactive memory is information that has been finished with that can be free'd up when another app needs it. I keep getting Out Of Memory messages up so why isn't the Inactive Memory freeing itself? The pie chart is almost 3/4 full! Why doesn't it use the RAM it has? Why does it only allow itself to use around a quarter or its memory? Is there a way of freeing it manually without having to restart?

2 gigs is fine usually...

Any help would be gratefully received!

PowerBook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on Apr 17, 2008 10:34 AM

18 replies

varjak paw

Level 10

182,668 points

Apr 17, 2008 11:46 AM in response to tele_player

Out of memory errors are usually due to corrupt or incompatible applications. It's rare that it's caused by an OS problem, though it can happen.

Apr 17, 2008 12:18 PM in response to tele_player

If you want to purge the memory, I just uploaded the "purge" binary [here|sftw.hostsnake.com/purge] (option-click).
Not 100% sure how legal this is.

Message was edited by: semicolons

varjak paw

Level 10

182,668 points

Apr 17, 2008 3:34 PM in response to Geraint Reynolds

Just in case it might make a difference, what version of Final Cut Pro are you running?

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Clear inactive memory