imac only using 6gb of 12gb memory - why?

[Stixster]

Hi,

Had installed vmFusion on the iMac, but removed it today,. However, I have 12gb RAM installed but Activity Monitor shows that Memory used is 5.99gb, cached files 1.98gb and a swap file has been used. I thought that when VMFusion was installed 5Gb was 'assigned' to that VM. IS that my problem now? How do I release all memory just for the iMac now I've taken VmFusion off?

Thanks

 

[Fishrrman]

Maybe 6gb is all that it needs at the moment?

 

[Stixster]

Maybe 6gb is all that it needs at the moment?

I get that, make sense, but why woudl it still need to use a swap file? As you can probably tell I'm not that technical

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

You just aren't using that much RAM now, but the OS will gladly use it when needed. I have 16GB installed in my iMac, and right now I have 8.28GB used, with cached at 4GB. If I fire up Lightroom, used goes to 9.5GB and cached to 4.5GB. The Swap is just in case you happen to hit your RAM cap. If it wasn't there and you maxed your RAM, you'd have system crashes.

 

[Stixster]

OK, sounds like I dont need to worry too much about it. I just thought remove VmFusion was only part of the process. Thanks for the help.

 

[chrfr]

OK, sounds like I dont need to worry too much about it. I just thought remove VmFusion was only part of the process. Thanks for the help.

VMWare Fusion will not permanently use that RAM. The RAM only gets used when you actually start up the virtual machine, and even then, Fusion may not use all that the virtual machine is assigned.

 

[casperes1996]

I get that, make sense, but why woudl it still need to use a swap file? As you can probably tell I'm not that technical

If the OS has data that an application would like to store in memory, but the data doesn't need to be accessible quickly, and actually almost doesn't matter how slowly the data is retrieved, macOS may just put it in a swap file, so that if something that requires faster access comes along, it can more quickly put that in memory, or it can cache other things.

OK, sounds like I dont need to worry too much about it. I just thought remove VmFusion was only part of the process. Thanks for the help.

VMWare only reserves memory when it is running.