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RAM usage to the max

S

shakespeare

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 29, 2002
294
0
Portland, Maine
Hey guys,

I was looking around old posts for information about pageouts and how to use the RAM best in OS X. I found this interesting thread.

Look particularly at AmbitiousLemon's two posts there.

In it, he talks about how after a while of using OS X, your RAM gets filled up with little bits of cached information from applications you've run and then quit. The only way to prevent yourself from running out of RAM, then, is to leave the applications running if you're going to use them, or reboot. This doesn't seem to fit with the always-on thing Apple seems to expect us to do.

But that post was from the days of OS X 10.1. Does anyone know if that sort of thing is a problem still? And if it is still a problem, is there any way to flush out the RAM caches without a reboot - to free up RAM for running applications?

I just want to use my RAM to the fullest, without it getting bogged down remembering stuff it doesn't need to. Anyone know how?
 
it seems to me that my ram does get filled up. i have a gig of ram in my machine. right now there are only 15megs of ram available. 510.2 megs is inactive ram, meaning, like you said, that closed programs are still holding on to that ram so if i open them again they will load faster and other performance reasons. but just now i opened photoshop (which hasn't been open since my last restart) and a ton of large images. watching my ram usage, i noticed only about 1 to 2 megs of free ram get used up. but that 510.2 megs that was 'inactive' dropped down tremendously. i then quit photoshop and all that ram went back to 'inactive' now when i opened illustrator, just as i was opening it, i noticed about 150 megs transfer from inactive to FREE.

so basically, yes, programs hold on to ram for later usage. but when all the ram seems to be used and a new program needs some ram, os X finds the oldest inactive ram and transfers it to whatever is a higher priority.
 
:) Thanks for the reply. That's what I was hoping to hear. I have a gig of RAM myself and I had figured that should be enough.

Why do I get lots of pageouts, then, if I'm using RAM-intensive operations (Photoshop and the like)? I have enough RAM that the apps I'm using should be happy, and there's still a lot of inactive RAM, but the system keeps using pageouts, which slows things down a lot. I can't help but wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

But again, that's comforting. Thank you. :cool:
 
Originally posted by shakespeare
:) Thanks for the reply. That's what I was hoping to hear. I have a gig of RAM myself and I had figured that should be enough.

Why do I get lots of pageouts, then, if I'm using RAM-intensive operations (Photoshop and the like)? I have enough RAM that the apps I'm using should be happy, and there's still a lot of inactive RAM, but the system keeps using pageouts, which slows things down a lot. I can't help but wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

But again, that's comforting. Thank you. :cool:
Click to expand...

every unix / linux does so. ( free memory is bad memory :D )
 
Originally posted by maradong
every unix / linux does so. ( free memory is bad memory :D )
Click to expand...
Absolutely, it's perfectly normal behaviour. The RAM is much faster than the Harddrive so it makes sense that rather than completely clearing out old stuff the OS keeps it cached in case it may be needed so speeding up the subsequent start up of those apps. If the OS needs some RAM for an active process it'll use some of the cached RAM. As maradong suggested free memory is wasted memory.
 
Originally posted by caveman_uk
Absolutely, it's perfectly normal behaviour. The RAM is much faster than the Harddrive so it makes sense that rather than completely clearing out old stuff the OS keeps it cached in case it may be needed so speeding up the subsequent start up of those apps. If the OS needs some RAM for an active process it'll use some of the cached RAM. As maradong suggested free memory is wasted memory.
Click to expand...
exactly.
therefore unix/ linux systems normally get faster with a longer uptime, not like the wintel machines.
and, unix gets faster with every restart at the beginning, as the cache of the applications has to be created. this done, it s normally blazing fast :D
i do love unix.
 
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