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When I open the activity monitor, I suddenly find that my free memory is only 500 more MB out of 4GB. Although my Mac pro is performing well right now, I have already started to concern in the future whether those unnecessary processes who are taking my memory would affect the speed.
So, is there any way to stop those unnecessary processes so that the free or available memory can be more? Thanks a lot!
You need to be more specific and tell us what items in Activity Monitor are taking up the memory.
for instance, my 3.5 GB memory are used by Wired, Active, and Inactive, each for 1 GB or so. My question is whether there is a way to stop those rarely used processes from running when my mac starts up.
When I used windows before, I can use RUN to manage the startup programs in order to release some free memory. Just want to know whether there is similar configuration methods. Thanks!
Go to System Preferences/System/Users & Groups/Login Items. Delete those items from there if you don't want them at startup.
You can also Force Quit them from Activity Monitor to stop them from currently running.
You should note that free memory is basically wasted memory. Don't make assumptions, especially based on how Windows works, and don't try to micro-manage OS X's memory management.
It sounds like you have about 1 GB of inactive memory, plus the 0.5 GB of free memory. Inactive memory is essentially the same as free memory, in that it will be freed immediately if needed, so you really have 1.5 GB that are basically free. The difference is that inactive memory can be used to make your Mac work faster. For example, you may not be using the contents of that RAM at the moment, and it can safely be deleted without a problem, but it could also be re-used to prevent having to load that same data into RAM a second time. Think of it as a RAM "cache" of sorts.
If most of your memory were in the active or wired states, and your page outs were 10% or more of page ins, then you would need more RAM for the tasks that you are doing.
my Mac pro is performing well right now
Then just use it. What you're describing is not a problem.
Oh right, because trying to prevent problems is now a bad thing...
Did you notice that this thread is 4 years old?
And you may not know this, but Linc has stopped posting new content to the forums. He did a huge amount of good in these forums, and his contributions are missed.
how to stop unnecessary processes
