Memory Pressure Always Yellow

Question

Memory Pressure Always Yellow

Hello everyone, I would like to ask for some help figuring out why my activity monitor is constantly yellow/amber.

The machine is a late 2013 base macbook air (1.3 i5, 4GB, 128GB SSD)

I just did a fresh reformat of Mavericks 10.9.4 with a USB thumb drive and reinstalled my apps, office, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary.

My memory always looks like this in activity monitor:

The apps I have open are activity monitor, safari with 4 tabs, messages, Air Mail, twitter, and Spotify.

The computer is not necessarily hanging or slow, but with have a small hiccup once in a while. Sometimes get a beach ball. Is this merely not having enough ram

? I would expect a fairly new macbook air to be able to handle these tasks....

Thanks for any insight.

MacBook Air (13-inch Mid 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)

Posted on Aug 3, 2014 11:19 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 3, 2014 11:24 AM in response to fallingreason

Try turning the applications off one at a time and see what happens. Start with Spotify since that is a music streaming app and could use a lot of resources.

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Answer 2

Aug 3, 2014 11:38 AM in response to Ralph Landry1

With Spotify closed, it looks like this:

The graph is just as "full" but no longer yellow... this still bothers me though, shouldn't I be able to use Spotify with no problem?

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Answer 3

Aug 3, 2014 11:46 AM in response to fallingreason

Anything involving videos, music, photos uses a lot of memory. All the yellow tells you is that the memory is actually in use and not just allocated. The green means a lower level use of the memory. Notice that your Memory Used and Virtual Memory go up a little with Spotify running...that means there is less memory available for actual use. The current Mac OS X versions allocate almost all memory that exists, even if it is not being used. With Spotify running more of that allocations is in use so there is less for other tasks.

You can experiment if you like by turning off the other apps and turning on Spotify and see what the memory pressure is then.

Overall, that is really not bad performance for 4 GB of memory. You would see much less pressure if you had 8 GB.

This is what it looks like for me with 8 GB memory: (no Spotify)

You can see the memory is almost all allocated, but the pressure is really low.

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