4GB Physical Memory but 3.67GB Used

Question

4GB Physical Memory but 3.67GB Used

Hey there, I'm not so great with computers, I essentially know the basics, and thought might as well post a question about it and see where that takes me. I appreciate the help! Thanks in advance!

I have a 13-inch Macbook pro (Mid 2012) with 4GB memory. I was browsing around and discovered a table in the activity monitor stating the following;

- Physical Memory: 4.00GB

- Memory Used: 3.75GB

- Virtual Memory: 4.51GB

- Swap Use: 35.3 MB

From reading other questions and the responses to them I have realized that Maverick takes up a lot of memory but I'm not quite sure why my swap used isn't zero. I don't have much on this Macbook and have bought it recently. Why is the Swap use not zero? Is it a bad thing that it's 35.3MB?

The reason I was looking around was to figure out if my Macbook would be good to run downloaded games and such on; this is a shared laptop and that's what my brothers are interested in doing for the most part. Yes, we have a huge age gap.

Much appreciated,

Simran

Posted on Jun 24, 2014 11:24 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,017 points

Jun 24, 2014 11:30 PM in response to Community User

Swap is always used. No big deal. What is a big deal is PageOuts.

About OS X Memory Management and Usage

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory & determine how much RAM is used

OS X Mavericks- About Activity Monitor

Memory Management in Mac OS X

Understanding top output in the Terminal

The amount of available RAM for applications is the sum of Free RAM and Inactive RAM. This will change as applications are opened and closed or change from active to inactive status. The Swap figure represents an estimate of the total amount of swap space required for VM if used, but does not necessarily indicate the actual size of the existing swap file. If you are really in need of more RAM that would be indicated by how frequently the system uses VM. If you open the Terminal and run the top command at the prompt you will find information reported on Pageins () and Pageouts (). Pageouts () is the important figure. If the value in the parentheses is 0 (zero) then OS X is not making instantaneous use of VM which means you have adequate physical RAM for the system with the applications you have loaded. If the figure in parentheses is running positive and your hard drive is constantly being used (thrashing) then you need more physical RAM.

Adding RAM only makes it possible to run more programs concurrently. It doesn't speed up the computer nor make games run faster. What it can do is prevent the system from having to use disk-based VM when it runs out of RAM because you are trying to run too many applications concurrently or using applications that are extremely RAM dependent. It will improve the performance of applications that run mostly in RAM or when loading programs.

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