Q: How to free-up more RAM?

Having an integrated GPU versus a discrete GPU means that your Mac and OS X shares RAM for both tasks and video processes.

There is no way to change this.

Plus, if you are running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Mavericks will use all of the available installed RAM for itself and dole it out to applications as needed.

This is different from how RAM was handled in earlier versions of OS X. There is no free RAM in OS X Mavericks. Mavericks uses all the available RAM.

In OS X Mavericks, free RAM is wasted RAM.

How full is your Mac's hard drive?

If your Mac Mini is slow, you may have some incompatible/outdated third party software and/or unnecessary antivirus and/or hard drive "cleaning" apps installed on your Mac.

It would help us to help you if we could have some more technical info about your iMac.

If you so choose, please download, install and run Etrecheck.

Etrecheck was developed as a simple Mac diagnostic reporting tool by a regular Apple Support forum user and technical support contributor named Etresoft. Etrecheck is a small, unobstrusive app that compiles a static snapshot of your entire Mac hardware system and installed software.

This is a free app that has been honestly created to provided help in diagnosing issues with Macs running the new OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

It is not malware and can be safely downloaded and installed onto your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Copy/paste and post its report here in another reply thread so that we have a complete profile of your Mac's hardware and installed software so we can all help with your Mac performance issues.

Thank You.

One point not correct. Mavericks will not use all the Ram that you have installed.  It will use all the necessary Ram.  If you have a lot of Ram like >16GB it will still show quite a bit of unused Ram(depending of course what you have running at the time).  I have two Macs with 16GB running Mavericks and each only uses about 4-5GB at any one time.  The rest indicates as unused Ram available.

tbirdvet wrote:

 

One point not correct. Mavericks will not use all the Ram that you have installed.  It will use all the necessary Ram.  If you have a lot of Ram like >16GB it will still show quite a bit of unused Ram(depending of course what you have running at the time).  I have two Macs with 16GB running Mavericks and each only uses about 4-5GB at any one time.  The rest indicates as unused Ram available.

No.

You are incorrect.

Basically Mavericks tries to use all  of the available memory or  as much as possible all the time by preloading app cache data to the RAM to speed up app speed and compress data on the RAM to make accommodations for new apps you just opened, for an example.

That's why in activity monitor you get pressure instead of paging because now it is a question of how much more room of compression can they get before Mavericks actually starts utilizing the disk swap file (page out amount).

If your Memory pressure is in the green, you are generally okay.

Activity Monitor - Mavericks

Activity Monitor in Mavericks has significant changes

Performance Guide

Why is my computer slow

Why your Mac runs slower than it should

Slow Mac After Mavericks

Things you can do to resolve slowdowns  see post by Kappy

Post the Etrecheck report.

That will tell ALL of us what you have installed on your Mac that may be causing your system slowdowns.