Why is there so much wired memory used on my Macbook Pro?

There is nothing wrong with "Wired Memory".

From: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Performance/Conceptual /ManagingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.htm…

"Wired Memory

Wired memory (also called resident memory) stores kernel code and data structures that must never be paged out to disk. Applications, frameworks, and other user-level software cannot allocate wired memory. However, they can affect how much wired memory exists at any time. For example, an application that creates threads and ports implicitly allocates wired memory for the required kernel resources that are associated with them.

Table 2 lists some of the wired-memory costs for application-generated entities.

As you can see, every thread, process, and library contributes to the resident footprint of the system. In addition to your application using wired memory, however, the kernel itself requires wired memory for the following entities:

• VM objects
• the virtual memory buffer cache
• I/O buffer caches
• drivers

Wired data structures are also associated with the physical page and map tables used to store virtual-memory mapping information, Both of these entities scale with the amount of available physical memory. Consequently, when you add memory to a system, the amount of wired memory increases even if nothing else changes. When a computer is first booted into the Finder, with no other applications running, wired memory can consume approximately 14 megabytes of a 64 megabyte system and 17 megabytes of a 128 megabyte system.

Wired memory pages are not immediately moved back to the free list when they become invalid. Instead they are “garbage collected” when the free-page count falls below the threshold that triggers page out events."

If you are experiencing problems, start a new thread and provide details of your issue and your equipment.

I too have this problem. I'm using osx 10.7.5. I've noticed that this occurs if I'm doing a lot of streaming such as on Youtube. I have a feeling it is related to FLASH. This usually gets fixed if I reboot a couple of times. However, I get the spinning wheel when this happens. It spins for quite a while (several minutes), but then the problem is fixed. Any idea what the OS is doing to fix this? Even though it fixes the problem, it's a pain to have to wait so long to use my Mac.

Any way of freeing up the wired RAM without rebooting?

Wired RAM is that permanently in use by the OS. I'd say you have some sort of a problem because it shouldn't be nearly that high. Have you tried shutting down then restarting?

Also:

Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order. If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time, then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar. Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process. See if that helps. Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.

Wired memory is not unusable. It is memory that is both being used and marked as not swappable back to disk by the Virtual Memory Manager.

Now, 5.32 GB of wired memory does seem high, generally speaking, but since I don't know what applications you have running I can't say anything about whether it really is high in your specific case. For example, VMWare and Parallels both cause the memory assigned to virtual machines as RAM to be wired (or at least a good chunk of it) for performance reasons. Do you use any VMs? It's entirely possible that professional music and video editing applications could do similar things (although I can't say because I don't use any).

You can look at Activity Monitor and try to find processes whose Real Memory is >= their Virtual Memory; these would tend to be the ones with wired memory. Processes where the Virtual Memory is larger than the Real Memory are definitely eligible for paging in and out.

I've yet to see my wired RAM even exceed 1 GB. But, yes, running a VM will wire its RAM but you'd have to have a lot of RAM assigned to the VMs to hit 6 GBs! Especially, for a machine with only 8 GBs of RAM.

Agreed - but as I said, it depends what he's running, which we don't know. A Windows VM with 4GB of RAM to play a high-end FPS, plus the normal OS X wired memory, could easily come close to 5.5GB.

I've seen this goofy thing happen on my Mac Pro a while back. This was the suggested solution, I think, or I might have simply stumbled on it. Glad it worked for you.

Hi,

Restart is not a sustainable solution because after restart wired memory counts up again until all 8 GB are consumed. I have a similar problem with my Macbook Pro 2011, 8GB. Wired memory counts up to 100% over a period of 4-5 regular usage days. The more I use the macbook, the more wired memory grows until I have to restart again, otherwise the machine becomes slow because it uses the harddrive for memory. This is not normal!

Attached is a screenshot of the activity monitor. I'm not able to identify the process which leaks the wired memory.

But once I had an eyeopening experience: I was about to restart my totally wired memory overloaded macbook but canceled the shutdown because of some reason. Some of the processes and programmes were already terminated and SURPRISE, the wired memory was down to 10%! The 8 Gb were mostly shared by active and inactive memory, as it should be! So some process was terminated during shutdown which caused the leak and even freed all of the wired memory. I did work with the macbook for 2 more days without any memory problem. Once I restarted, the leaking problem went on again.

My gut-feeling says the hole problem started when I installed VM ware fusion a while ago. But I did a clean uninstall.

The solution could be to identify the leaking process, but how should I do this? It is not clear to me wether wired memory is real, virtual, private or shared memory. Is there any tool which identify memory leaks?

According to g_wolfman, the only process with a hugh difference between real and virtual memory is the kernel_task and the many Chrome Renderer processes. Have always 30 tabs open in chrome plus Safari (Flash disabled). I'm not able to terminate the kernel_task of course.

Is there any way to isolate the troublesome process? There is no save start mode like in Microsoft Windows possible? This would be the first think I would do, checking if the problem persists in save mode.

Disabled every start login objects btw.

For what it's worth I found a program that seems to fix the problem. It's called "Memory Cleaner" and I think it was free. I have 8gb of ram in my iMac and it sometimes reads at 100% according to iStat Menus. When I run the Memory Cleaner it frees up about 60% of the wired memory. I have no idea why or how this happens, but it seems to help and avoids a restart.

simply use "purge" command on terminal... really helps without a restart... it wil do the magic 🙂

I have the same problem with my macbook pro late 2011, I have installed 16GB memory and it's getting cosumed during using the VMware. I am using the purge comamnd from reclaim memory, it works fine. No need to restart.

I tried to "purge" in Terminal and was unsuccessful. Received this:

"Unable to purge disk buffers: Operation not permitted"

Any ideas? Thanks Susan