My question is simple; I have high memory usage ('Memory Used' in Activity Monitor) which is approx 3.8/4 GB, with only chrome running. My memory usage is in the low greens and I have never even seen it go to yellow. My only concern is that there is only 0.2 GB left for any other application to run; is there too much being used or is this normal and will it cause any slowdowns?
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)
Chrome is a pig, to begin with ... it will use more RAM than other web browsers. The color (green) tells you that RAM is sufficient to not cause too many bottlenecks. And OSX will use as much RAM as it thinks is required, using the swapfile on the storage (HD or SSD) to save off RAM segments that are less active.
More RAM could help the system run faster, but the "green" tells you your system is not "strangled".
Chrome is a pig, to begin with ... it will use more RAM than other web browsers. The color (green) tells you that RAM is sufficient to not cause too many bottlenecks. And OSX will use as much RAM as it thinks is required, using the swapfile on the storage (HD or SSD) to save off RAM segments that are less active.
More RAM could help the system run faster, but the "green" tells you your system is not "strangled".
There was a change in the Mac RAM management that allowed unused RAM to be reserved for fast access, on the theory that unused RAM that is wasted RAM. The result is faster processing. The system will quickly reassign reserved RAM to other apps that are invoked.
If your memory pressure is low and you aren't seeing many swaps used, you are fine.
EDIT: Here is an example from my iMac with 12GB RAM and six open apps:
Note that "Memory Used" and "Cache" add up to nearly all the 12 GB,. However, look at memory pressure and swaps. No problems here.
So just to clarify, the 'app' memory is reserved for an application so if it is used again it will load up quicker and if something else is loaded up, this 'reserved' memory is given to the new application. Is that correct?
The problem is that I was a Windows user and made the jump to a Mac; it slightly made things harder to understand. I also asked this question because my Mac takes about a minute to log on.
PS: Thanks a lot for the help!
Hi MoeAhsan715:
You have not indicated what Model / year your macbook pro is.
Mine is Macbook pro early 2011.
My boot time was also about a minute, so I upgraded the memory to 8GB and changed the HD to a Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB SSD drive.
Now my boot time is about 15 seconds.
The problem is that I was a Windows user and made the jump to a Mac; it slightly made things harder to understand. I also asked this question because my Mac takes about a minute to log on.
I can sympathize with that. I only used Windows late in life and in non-Mac environments. Early into that journey, I was at first impressed by the fact that the Windows desktop came up so fast. However I soon discovered that, although I had a desktop showing, I could not use any apps for some time longer. Obviously it was still loading important OS components after the desktop came up. This was on fairly fast Win7 computers, like a 3gHZ i7 model.
On all our Macs, the computer is usable very soon after the Desktop is up. Any delay between the Desktop showing fully rendered and being able to use any app on the computer was a fraction of what I had in Win7.
Yeah, I agree with what you say (Allan). The Mac OSX is indeed very usable after startup (unlike Windows) But I got to know what cause the slight delay; 'Login Items'. I had more than 20 of these (mostly third party) on, so I closed half of them. Voila!! From 1 minute 32 seconds to just under 30 seconds!! Thanks for helping me understand about the RAM; I do believe Mac OSX uses it much more efficiently.
Another thing about OSX vs Windows ... stability. Windows is getting better, but still a bug in the printer driver can break your network configuration tables.
OSX can run for weeks and not need reboot. Even the failure of a single application (like Firefox) usually does not disturb even other web browsers or the network memory tables.
RAM Usage
