Hi,
Activity Monitor shows me that I have to keep quitting Safari or Chrome to have enough free memory
I find this astonishing.
I enclose 2 snapshots of my activity monitor. Does this look normal?
Any suggestions? I have looked round various forums and haven't found an answer.
Or is it just that 4gb is now the bare minimum to get by?
R
H
R
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.7)
4 GB should be fine but you're running 13 apps at one time. Why?
Why are you running 2 copies of Excel (2008 & 2011) as well as 2 copies of Word (2008 & 2011) at the same time? is this a test?
I assumed that with 4gb , 10 apps with 50mb each would be no problem!
Recently installed new Office.
Office keeps selecting the old apps to open some docs with.
I haven't got round to changing the preferences to prevent it.
But that is still only about 100Mb.
When you get around to setting newly installed programs up for use post again, we'll see what's happening then.
"Recently installed new Office.
Office keeps selecting the old apps to open some docs with.
I haven't got round to changing the preferences to prevent it.
But that is still only about 100Mb."
You can trash the old version. Then all Office files will open with the new one.
Thanks. Was worried that if MS didn't advise this in the install there may have been some reason for it with legacy docs.
Csound, bit rude...
100mb is not going to make a difference to my position nor my question.
I was asking on the basis of what people can see of my usage does everything look ok.
I would normally be switching between these apps all day.
If I used Safari a bit it would be up at 400-500Mb very quickly my free memory would be close to zero.
Is it the case that with 2 mail apps , 2 browsers and a few other programmes open that 4GB is insufficient and the programmes should be regularly restarted?
4GB should be fine.
How many tabs/windows do you have open in Safari and Chrome?
Because RAM is not the only resource in use, but Sig pointed you in the right direction. When you installed Office did you not get the option to remove the existing installation? it comes right at the end of the install?
Quit PostBox and you'll free up ~275MB RAM. Additionally, sometimes just quitting and relaunching Safari will significantly reduce its memory footprint.
CSound - if there was an option, I must have missed it.
Apple programs don't behave that way, a new Numbers for example, makes the old one "unavailable". (I think!)
That's correct, MS however do it another way, if you choose the 'remove old version' the installer tidies up, changes file associations etc, if you choose not to you are left with this odd 50/50 arrangement between the 2 versions.
Topher,
Thanks, but what I am asking is "should" I have to do that?
Unfortunately, yes. These days "4GB RAM" is the new "256MB RAM" of 8-10 years ago. As RAM has become cheaper and larger, application developers have stopped using it efficiently. If they need more RAM they just allocate a chunk of it, assuming that should your system run out you can easily pop in an upgrade or two.
Back when systems had only a few KB or MB of RAM, applications were written in clever ways to reduce the RAM footprint, but that is no longer a requirement for developers. Now even common libraries use large amounts of RAM for their various routines, and SDKs for developers make it easy for them to incorporate all of these libraries and resources into their programs.
In addition applications have become more complicated, and in doing so there are far more situations where memory leaks can occur, resulting in an application taking up more and more RAM as it runs to the point where it needs to be quit in order to free RAM for other uses (Safari is notorious for this).
Do keep in mind that even though you see a small green wedge of "Free RAM" in Activity Monitor, you can also safely lump the blue wedge in with it. The blue wedge is inactive RAM that is still holding information but is free to be used for other applications if needed. The yellow wedge is the RAM that's currently active and used, but technically could be paged to the hard drive to free up memory. The red wedge is RAM that cannot be paged to the hard drive or rendered inactive.
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