Snow Leopard Memory Hog

Andy - Thanks for the tip on the "purge" command!!! Worked like a charm! Keep fighting the good fight!

My pleasure, friends. I think there's an overwhelming majority of us that have systems that are less than "ideal", and we need as many tools as we can get to keep things moving. I guess everyone at some point can be looked at as having an "ivory tower" view of where others are at, regardless of how hard you try to help. Getting past the rules on paper looking at the realities of each situation is how you come up with real solutions.

Andy - let me chime in too, although I'm new to this forum. Thank you very much for taking the time.

I'm an engineering professor at Stanford and have been using Apple products since about 1978, when I got started fixing them to make pocket money. This stuff flat-out shouldn't be happening to those of us using realistic sets of apps. It is good that some are trying to dig in deeper than going to the Apple Store.

The big question is, does any of this get through to Apple? If not, we will continue, and likely move toward systems that are only tested for consumer-level use with no support for anything more than a year old.

Again, thank you for your efforts and for those of you who can try to help without getting too sarcastic nor condescending. Onward!

Being an old programmer from a punch card age it occurs to me the old addage "garbage in garbage out", which originally refferred to the failure of a programer to de-allocate ram adresses to un rereferenced variables, might apply to this "Inactive" blue ram. If the addresses that contain garbage aren't cleared in the program code, by the programmer during the writing of the code, then allocating the same memory addresses to new variables simply generates garbage now held by that variable. And all that ram is full of those memory addresses are relegated to garbage that haven't been

....wait for it....

....purged .

Spotlight is still a problem tho..