I notice by just surfing the web ram starts to drop slowly. I use memory clean to clean memory up. My question is if this is normal? its starting to bug me I only have 4gb of ram and if I install 16gb will it drop as well by just Web surfing?
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Mac mini ram late 2012
- Thread starter Roadking714
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Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Years ago, everything a browser was doing was contained in one process. Now we have multi processes each sucking down RAM like it's going out of style. If you are running Mavericks, what does your Memory Pressure look like in Activity Monitor?
The Memory Pressure looks good. If you ever get it into the yellow or red area you definitely need more RAM. It wouldn't hurt to go to 8 GB in there, but at that rate, it wouldn't help too immensely.
It will certainly use more because it isn't being restricted! I don't see what you mean by drop like the 4 GB? I am guessing you are asking if you can get it to 15 GB of RAM usage with just the web? Generally not unless you had dozens (30+) tabs running benchmarks and intensive tasks.
Right now I am at 7.71 GB used with Mail open, 2 tabs of Safari, Messages, Spotify, Skype, Mactracker, and Activity Monitor. I have really low Memory Pressure. I have pushed my Mac to use all 16 GB with max Memory Pressure during intensive video work. But that is an extreme scenario.
My Mini came with 8GB and the 1TB HDD, between the two of those it was generally pretty dang slow, but in my defense it was the first time I actively used a computer with an HDD in a while. I'm also using the Mini with OS X Server and MAMP, so the various services do consume a bit of resources on their own.
That said, the OP's memory usage doesn't look all that bad and there's minimal swap being used. I do miss the page-in and page-out stats in Activity Monitor as that was truly the best indicator of whether or not more memory should be added. This info can still be found via Terminal.app by running "top". Here's mine with 16GB.
Load Avg: 1.13, 1.41, 1.53 CPU usage: 1.46% user, 3.75% sys, 94.77% idle SharedLibs: 312K resident, 0B data, 0B linkedit. MemRegions: 218636 total, 7067M resident, 0B private, 1019M shared. PhysMem: 14G used (1665M wired), 1933M unused. VM: 888G vsize, 1025M framework vsize, 3066(0) swapins, 5254(0) swapouts.
That's not too bad, the closer to 0 the better. If you're seeing tens or hundreds of thousands of swapouts then you really should look into getting more memory. This means that the OS is using the swap file on disk as memory and this really slows your system down, though not too bad if you have an SSD.
I would recommend installing memory in pairs and not mixing/matching sizes.
8GB of Crucial memory from Amazon is $80, 16GB is $147. Which way to go really depends on your use and "need" but 16GB will provide that much more room for growth and file/app cache, which will help with speed if you're always running the same apps.
If you're on a budget then I would go with 8GB and look into getting an SSD, both of these will make your Mini feel much, much faster and more responsive.
That said, the OP's memory usage doesn't look all that bad and there's minimal swap being used. I do miss the page-in and page-out stats in Activity Monitor as that was truly the best indicator of whether or not more memory should be added. This info can still be found via Terminal.app by running "top". Here's mine with 16GB.
Load Avg: 1.13, 1.41, 1.53 CPU usage: 1.46% user, 3.75% sys, 94.77% idle SharedLibs: 312K resident, 0B data, 0B linkedit. MemRegions: 218636 total, 7067M resident, 0B private, 1019M shared. PhysMem: 14G used (1665M wired), 1933M unused. VM: 888G vsize, 1025M framework vsize, 3066(0) swapins, 5254(0) swapouts.
That's not too bad, the closer to 0 the better. If you're seeing tens or hundreds of thousands of swapouts then you really should look into getting more memory. This means that the OS is using the swap file on disk as memory and this really slows your system down, though not too bad if you have an SSD.
I would recommend installing memory in pairs and not mixing/matching sizes.
8GB of Crucial memory from Amazon is $80, 16GB is $147. Which way to go really depends on your use and "need" but 16GB will provide that much more room for growth and file/app cache, which will help with speed if you're always running the same apps.
If you're on a budget then I would go with 8GB and look into getting an SSD, both of these will make your Mini feel much, much faster and more responsive.
I am running mountain lion here is what happens to your ram if you have 16gb.
to complain to apple memory pressure is worthless. it lacks proper context. the op has 35mb swap that could be bad if he just booted and only ran the machine for 1 minute.
this is a much better program for memory use.
if you see I have 7 gb page in and 0 page out along with 0 swap. that is great.
but mavericks does not give this to you.
that borders on criminal neglect as you may buy ram you do not need and they could have shown you perfect info to tell you if you need ram
Apple should really really really fix this for us.
to complain to apple memory pressure is worthless. it lacks proper context. the op has 35mb swap that could be bad if he just booted and only ran the machine for 1 minute.
this is a much better program for memory use.
if you see I have 7 gb page in and 0 page out along with 0 swap. that is great.
but mavericks does not give this to you.
that borders on criminal neglect as you may buy ram you do not need and they could have shown you perfect info to tell you if you need ram
Apple should really really really fix this for us.
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That's for your use case, which doesn't really apply to others since we all run different apps, etc.
Here's mine with 16GB on Mavericks, notice how app memory alone is > 8GB.
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Memory Pressure should be taken like the oil pressure in a car. You know if it is up there it is going to blow something in the engine. My analogy is that if your memory pressure is high, then your machine will slow down and you will start using the HD as RAM.
My "problem" is that Mavericks dumbed-down the memory stats/display info and made it more difficult to get the numbers. A graph without metrics is pointless to me. It's like telling me how much disk space I have free by simply displaying green, yellow or red and hiding the actual used/free info.
While digging into this I found some info that some might find useful.
One is the "memory_pressure" command which you can run to simulate different memory loads/conditions and you can watch how the graph in Activity Monitor changes. "man memory_pressure" to see the details.
The other is that getting the pagein/pageout info is still relatively easy to get via Terminal.app and the "vm_stat" command. To make it really easy, just run this...
Code:
PGIN=`vm_stat -c 1 1 | tail -1 | awk '{print $19" * 4096 / 1024^2"}' | bc`;PGOUT=`vm_stat -c 1 1 | tail -1 | awk '{print $20" * 4096 / 1024^2"}' | bc`;echo "Page-in (MB): $PGIN";echo "Page-out (MB): $PGOUT"Which will then result in output like this...
Page-in (MB): 12789
Page-out (MB): 61
So you can go by the pretty graph or you can compare page-in to page-out and if the page-out number is very small then you're fine on memory. In my case there was about 12.5GB paged in but only 61MB paged out and that is very healthy.
yeah I left out that I was using almost no apps at all and that ram will drift up a bit. If I did the exact same with 8gb I would not be at 7.3 used it would drift to around half or 5gb out of the eight.
I really don't like what they did with mavericks os. I do run one machine on it my 2012 quad
