iMac Ram Usage

[nidserz]

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Hi all,

I have a 20" 2.66ghz iMac with 2gb ram.
When I restart my computer and open up my programs: msn messenger, adobe cs3, mail, firefox, and cross over games + counter strike I have ~1gb memory in use. However, after a few hours memory usage goes up to 1.5gb and I quit everything except msn and firefox, but memory usage is still over 1gb.

I'm not sure if I am reading activity monitor wrong because it has: free, active, inactive, used.

I'm confused so if anybody could explain or advise me that would be really helpful. Thanks!

Oh and I'm thinking of upping to 4gb by xmas.

 

[itickings]

In a nutshell - free memory is completely unused (or wasted) memory. There shouldn't be much unused memory unless the computer recently started.

The sum of free+inactive is of interest however, but what really matters is the page in/page out ratio.

Check out the support article Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor for a breakdown of the different labels (free, inactive, wired etc).

 

[keekl]

In a nutshell - free memory is completely unused (or wasted) memory. There shouldn't be much unused memory unless the computer recently started.

The sum of free+inactive is of interest however, but what really matters is the page in/page out ratio.

Check out the support article Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor for a breakdown of the different labels (free, inactive, wired etc).

Thanks for the info~"search" is faster than new threads