Massive amount of RAM occupied by doing nothing!

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Level 1

45 points

Massive amount of RAM occupied by doing nothing!

Hello!

I need your help to solve this because it's really getting frustrating, so please read and try to help me!

My specs: MacBook Pro Mid 2012 (Model 9,2) 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 16GB RAM 1600MHz DDR3 (bought separately from corsair (MacMemory)).

So here's the deal: I spend a lot of time on safari using youtube, but it turns out, that I check Activity Montior and "Kernel_task" occupies 1.10 GB of RAM, so basically, I am using 7GB of ram by watching youtube videos and having small apps open such as Alfred, Unclutter, Fantastical, etc, which seams not logical to me. So I want to know how can I solve this. I downloaded the app called "Memory Clean" and it says that used 7GB by only using safari.

Please help!

Thanks!

MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Aug 31, 2014 7:18 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,739 points

Aug 31, 2014 8:18 PM in response to EduardoLG

It's normal in Mavericks for almost all memory to be in use, either by applications or by the file cache. That's what you should want, since unused memory is going to waste. The relevant measure of whether memory is in short supply is what Apple calls "memory pressure."

Apple's explanation of memory pressure is here. If you want a more detailed, technical description, see here.

"Memory Clean" and similar products are worse than useless.

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