Memory Issue - Inactive Memory?

Question

Level 1

0 points

Memory Issue - Inactive Memory?

Been having an out of memory issue with Capture One Pro. When i have the Activity Monitor open I can watch the "Inactive Memory" slowly climb higher. It starts out when i first boot at about 170 mb - currently at 351 mb and climbing, and all i have running is firefox and Itunes.

At first i thought it was a C1 Pro issue, but it seems that may not be the case.

When i opened the Activity monitor last night the Inactive Memory was at 10 gigabytes. ***?

What is Inactive memory? and why would it keep climbing?

Is this an issue with OSX that anyone has heard?

All software is current.

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 12 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MP51.007F.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.39f11
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f11

Mac Pro - 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Mar 10, 2011 9:28 AM

Reply

Answer 1

bendts Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 10, 2011 9:46 AM in response to bendts

Answer from apple support - Inactive memory shows what a previously opened program used - it stays listed as inactive so that if you restart that program it starts faster. But it is supposed to look like Free memory to other programs when you open them.

Jeez - how fast do we need a program to re-open on 64 bit quad core machines.

Reply

Answer 2

Mar 10, 2011 9:51 AM in response to bendts

Inactive Memory is comprised of blocks from Files you have read. If you were to request the same files again, it would be very fast. If necessary, these pages will simply be discarded to make way for other stuff to come into Main memory. This is generally not the source of System Slowdowns.

The best indicator of Memory trouble is PageOuts. A PageOut happens when there is nothing more that can be simply declared "out" and paged back in later, but a Page has to be written out before a new Page can be read in. (Most System and Application pages can be marked "out" and paged in later, directly from the System Files or Application Files.)

There is a PageOuts counter in Activity Monitor's memory pane, and some insist that the one in the Terminal top command is a little more accurate.

Reply

Answer 3

bendts Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 10, 2011 11:01 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

OK - thanks i will keep an eye on that too.

Reply

Answer 4

Mar 12, 2011 5:22 PM in response to bendts

bendts wrote:
Been having an out of memory issue with Capture One Pro. When i have the Activity Monitor open I can watch the "Inactive Memory" slowly climb higher.

Sounds like a classic memory leak. I'd see if there is a newer version or update for Capture One Pro. In the meantime periodically closing and re-opening it should help.

Reply

Answer 5

May 17, 2012 4:52 PM in response to Eric Eskam

Eric Eskam wrote:

Sounds like a classic memory leak.

I'm sorry, but you could not be more wrong. As explained above, Inactive memory is in effect a filesystem cache. So OS X is caching files in RAM as they are being written to disk by Capture One Pro - this is so that if they are re-read, they do not need to be re-read from disk which is slower. OS X uses this cache only when it's not needed by other programs.

The inactive memory is increasing here, because Capture One Pro is constantly writing to disk. OS X is then thinking "I have all this RAM that's not being used, how about I keep a copy of what's being written to disk in this spare RAM for speed?" .. make sense?

If Capture One Pro had a memory leak, that would be visible within wired/active memory, and the process itself would grow in size.

In fact, the more inactive memory your machine is consuming, the better.

Free RAM is wasted RAM.

Reply