joao p vs
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Q: Need Help with the memory management

I have a mac mini with 16gb of memory.  It worked perfectly well with Yosemite and I never run out of memory but since I updated to El Capitan (El Capritan) the memory is getting full and freezes the mac.  I used to have around of 5 to 7 gb of memory used and now using it in the same way as before its full at 16gb.  anyone can help me?  I am not too digitally minded but it seems weird that I run out of memory.

 

Thank you in advance for your kind assistance.

Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 15, 2015 5:34 AM

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joao p vs

Q: Need Help with the memory management

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  • by alex_h1,

    alex_h1 alex_h1 Oct 15, 2015 9:09 AM in response to joao p vs
    Community Specialists
    Oct 15, 2015 9:09 AM in response to joao p vs

    Hello joao p vs,

    Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.

     

    I see that you're having issues with processes on your Mac taking up too much memory.  I suggest that you use Activity Monitor as shown below to help you find which processes are taking the memory.

     

    This article describes some of the commonly used Activity Monitor features. For more information, open Activity Monitor and choose Help > Activity Monitor. You can also see a short description of many items in the Activity Monitor window by hovering the mouse pointer over the item.

     

    Memory

    The Memory pane shows information about how memory is being used:

    Memory pane

    More information is available at the bottom of the Memory pane:

    • Memory Pressure: The Memory Pressure graph helps illustrate the availability of memory resources. The graph moves from right to left and updates at the intervals set in View > Update Frequency. The current state of memory resources is indicated by the color at the right side of the graph:     
         
      • Green: Memory resources are available. 
        •  
      • Yellow: Memory resources are still available but are being tasked by memory-management processes, such as compression.
        •  
      • Red: Memory resources are depleted, and OS X is using your startup drive for memory. To make more RAM available, you can quit one or more apps or install more RAM. This is the most important indicator that your Mac may need more RAM.
    • Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed in your Mac. 
    • Memory Used: The total amount of memory currently used by all apps and OS X processes. 
         
      • App Memory: The total amount of memory currently used by apps and their processes.
        •  
      • Wired Memory: Memory that can’t be compressed or paged out to your startup drive, so it must stay in RAM. The wired memory used by a process can’t be borrowed by other processes. The amount of wired memory used by an app is determined by the app's programmer. 
        •  
      • Compressed: The amount of memory in RAM that is compressed to make more RAM memory available to other processes. Look in the Compressed Mem column to see the amount of memory compressed for each process.
    • Swap Used: The space used on your startup drive by OS X memory management. It's normal to see some activity here. As long as memory pressure is not in the red state, OS X has memory resources available.
    • Cached Files: Memory that was recently used by apps and is now available for use by other apps. For example, if you've been using Mail and then quit Mail, the RAM that Mail was using becomes part of the memory used by cached files, which then becomes available to other apps. If you open Mail again before its cached-files memory is used (overwritten) by another app, Mail opens more quickly because that memory is quickly converted back to app memory without having to load its contents from your startup drive.

    For more information about OS X memory management, refer to the Apple Developer website.

    Use Activity Monitor on your Mac - Apple Support

     

    Take care.