Slow increased RAM use

[elf69]

I got an old macbook, 2009 unibody running Sierra.

Have max ran for the 2.26GHz model of 8GB.

Now I use my machine for work so quite bit open at present:

Firefox 4 tabs
Chrome 3 tabs
Thunderbird
iMessage
Skype
Dropbox

The machine used to use 4.3GB ram if checked with HW monitor in utilities.
Now it is reading 5.14GB ram used.

Biggest use is firefox at 531MB closly followed by two chrome helper entries at just under 500MB

I have plenty of ram to cope with this but, why would the ram creep up in space of about a week.
Machine is shut down and goes home in my bag every nite, then taken back to work in morning.

As said plenty of ram but same apps and pages open.

 

[Weaselboy]

Totally normal. Newer OS X versions are fairly aggressive about trying to cache things, so you will see memory usage creep up the longer the system is running. As long as memory pressure is in the green, you don't need more RAM.

 

[elf69]

That's what I don't like as only 4GB ram in my imac and 3.20GB used most the time.

But this runs el Cap. 4GB ddr2 just getting daft expensive now.

 

[Weaselboy]

That's what I don't like as only 4GB ram in my imac and 3.20GB used most the time.

But this runs el Cap. 4GB ddr2 just getting daft expensive now.

Why do you not like it? Is it slowing your system down in some way. Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If the OS can cache things for you to make them faster, that is a good thing.

 

[elf69]

my El cap imac gets the beach ball at times.

Just need save for the 4GB stick to max out ram to 6GB