Activity Monitor Breakdown

[indigoflowAS]

I just bought myself a new 512mb chip for my TiBook and i've been monitoring RAM usage w/ the Activity Monitor...but i'm not 100% sure how to read it.

I imagine that the green (by default) Free indicator is good RAM, but is "blue RAM" (Inactive) good too?

Also, when i select "active processes" in the show menu, why does it not add up to what the pie chart shows?...I am showing a sum of about 280mb real mem usage, but the pie chart shows about 444mb.

I'm just curious...hope this makes sense...enlighten me if you can

 

[myrmidonjosh]

To the best of my knowledge, Activity Monitor's show's empty RAM (which is storing nothing) as green in the pie-chart and inactive RAM as blue, meaning that information is being stored in case it may be needed again but is available should it be called upon by other programs. So, both the green and blue representations of RAM usage are "good" per se.