Mac Pro 2009: 16GB of ram being used up quickly!

[rondocap]

So I have a 2009 Mac Pro quad core with 16GB of ram.

In activity monitor, it's often some red, some yellow, and all blue - no green. Using up all 16GB - and even have 2-3 gigs of page outs.

Here's what I am doing: I have 2 users logged in, and on one, it's just normal tasks like safari, mail, iTunes, etc. Normally it only takes like 4-6 gigs.

On the second user, I have Roxio Titanium/TiVo transfer app transferring and converting shows from my TV to my mac.

Does that really take up 16GB of ram doing that? I am surprised, I used to have 12GB and it was always enough. Crazy! I'm on lion 10.7.4 with an ATI 6870 graphics card and SSD drive.

 

[GGJstudios]

In activity monitor, it's often some red, some yellow, and all blue - no green. Using up all 16GB - and even have 2-3 gigs of page outs.

Here's what I am doing: I have 2 users logged in, and on one, it's just normal tasks like safari, mail, iTunes, etc. Normally it only takes like 4-6 gigs.

On the second user, I have Roxio Titanium/TiVo transfer app transferring and converting shows from my TV to my mac.

Does that really take up 16GB of ram doing that?

It might. There's nothing wrong with having no free memory, as inactive memory is also available to apps as they need it. If you're getting page outs under normal use, you may need more RAM. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[derbothaus]

The Roxio transfer could be using huge amounts of memory as it writes the file. There could be some leaking. Check "Real Memory" use with the info GGJ linked to. That will tell you what is using what.