1.2 GB of memory being used w/ no apps running

is this affecting the performance? Also, no apps at all, including no web browser open?

bigluc23 wrote:

Anyone?

Open Activity Monitor and see what is consuming the Ram, post back.

bigluc23 wrote:

Kernel Task 650MB

Dock 150MB

That was the first thing I looked at, but I was wondering if there was a method to help memory?

That is entirely normal, 🙂

bigluc23 wrote:

Really? Cause when I first got my Macbook, it wasn't using 1.5 GB with no apps running.

OK, go back to activity monitor and close unneeded apps, better yet restart and check what is running then. Look for apps starting at login and see what they consume.

I am having the exact same issue as bigluc23.

Up until about the last 2 weeks, my Macbook pro was running fine. Now as soon as I boot the machine, atMonitor shows 1.5GB of wired memory. The biggest hog of course is the opaque kernel_task which is using about half of that memory. Since many posters replying don't seem to get it, THIS WASN'T THIS WAY BEFORE.

Activity monitor doesn't show any application running. More precisely, it shows dozens of commands running that seem like they're system commands. I have gone through and randomly forced quit some of them, to no effect (and who knows how much damage I'm doing to my system force-quitting random processes?) So how can we find out what's using the memory? How can I ask kernel_task to enumerate what it's reserving memory for?

Some things I've done, to no avail:

Run ClamXav across my homedir a couple of times because I also suspect a trojan or virus or something, but it keeps coming back clean, even if I run with virus signatures recent to the past few days.

Gone to system preferences, accounts, and removed every single login item from my account, and rebooted cold (power down and power up again).

Killed random processes using Activity Monitor. Anything I didn't recognise. But there are dozens, and some of them seem to respawn after I kill them. This seems really stupid, and I can't believe I'm doing it.

I'm out of ideas. I don't want to restore my system, because I use time machine, and I bet it'll restore it to its current (broken) state and I'll be back at square 1. I want to find out what's happening here and solve it.

A few more things I've tried:

Change my desktop background to solid colour. No change.

Move a ****-tonne of large files out of my FileVaulted homedir. No change.

Turn off FileVault entirely - it'll take 8 hours for that experiment to run. Might not have time to try it for a while.

Whatever you call that thing when you press fn+f12, the widget dashboard thinger. Deleted almost all of the weather/time widgets from around the world and all of the stickies I could afford to delete. Rebooted. No change.

Sometimes after a fresh reboot I have 1.5GB of RAM used. Other times only about 900MB. But no matter what, it isn't enough for me to do my job properly anymore. This is really... REALLY annoying.

CCleaner also has the power to mess up your Mac totally (search this site for examples) I strongly suggest not using it.

Oh hold on. Are you saying doing those things fixed your problem?

For my part: disabling Dashboard (and rebooting): did not fix. Disabling Spotlight (and rebooting): did not fix. Do not understand how animations (which I did not change) would change the amount of wired memory used at boot-time.

I know killing random processes is a bad idea. I did it to see if people in this forum have a clue, and I'm discovering quickly, they do not.

As for viruses, you need to immediately stop giving anyone advice about viruses. You have a dangerous misunderstanding of how they work and how resilient OS/X is against them. The first virus couldn't be discovered by me, since I started using OS/X last year, and the first virus for Macs was found in 2006. A simple Google search turned that up.

Also note that earlier this year, 600,000 Apple computers were infected with a trojan. So that makes 600,000 people who've beat me to the punch, since I just started seeing this problem a few weeks ago. It's possible this problem is that I've gotten the Mac trojan and can't detect it.