Inactive Ram Problems

[Plo00p]

I just purchased a dual 2ghz G5 and I have been using Apple since i was a tot. I am getting a large amount of inactive ram about 500 megs or so. I have reformated and ive only had the computer for about 2 weeks. can anyne give me some tips or something i can do to fix this because i have a Gig and half of that goes to inactive ram which i cant access. Please help

 

[dodonutter]

I just purchased a dual 2ghz G5 and I have been using Apple since i was a tot. I am getting a large amount of inactive ram about 500 megs or so. I have reformated and ive only had the computer for about 2 weeks. can anyne give me some tips or something i can do to fix this because i have a Gig and half of that goes to inactive ram which i cant access. Please help

What do you mean by 'inactive RAM'? Do you mean the blue segment in activity monitor's system memory section?? If so then i think thats about normal. I have a gig of RAM in my PB and i've got 308Mb inactive at the moment. Don't no if this is RAM that is used up by memory leaks or if its just RAM an apps using but hasn't accessed for a while i don't know but i've always had the same thing.

 

[Sun Baked]

Trying to second guess the Virtual Memory Manager, or worse decide you can do it better.

Maybe you should read the definitions first...

# The active list contains pages that are currently mapped into memory and have been recently accessed.

# The inactive list contains pages that are currently resident in physical memory but have not been accessed recently. These pages contain valid data but may be released from memory at any time.

# The free list contains pages of physical memory that are not associated with any address space of VM object. These pages are available for immediate use by any process that needs them.

 

[Plo00p]

Is there any way that i can manually decide what goes into inactive memory cause im quit the gamer and usually need atleast 500mgz. The main problem is something keeps sucking up more and more inactive ram at times i have over 700 megz in there. i mean 700 inactive 200 active and 100 free sux. any ideas?

 

[ElectricSheep]

Is there any way that i can manually decide what goes into inactive memory cause im quit the gamer and usually need atleast 500mgz. The main problem is something keeps sucking up more and more inactive ram at times i have over 700 megz in there. i mean 700 inactive 200 active and 100 free sux. any ideas?

No, there is not. Trust me, you don't need to worry about it at all. You only need to worry about high levels of active memory and wired memory. That's it.

 

[Plo00p]

so does that mean just buy more ram???

 

[belvdr]

No, it means let the system page out what it wants to. In terms of inactive, if a process runs that requires more RAM than is free, anything in the inactive bucket is first for being swapped.

Every Unix and Unix-based OS I've seen does this. It uses all the RAM it can. If you could, say keep 700MB free, then you would essentially keep 700MB of RAM free for nothing.