What's eating up my memory?!

[XheartcoreboyX]

so im doing nothing except downloading 8 mp3 files from the net + safari +itunes opened(no music playing)..but my mbp(2.4 ghz,2gb ram) is running really hot and look at the cpu and ram read!!

Edit:im running on battery and its running down like fast!! cycles:12 its new.

 

[mad jew]

What app are you using to download the music? You seem to have plenty of available RAM (950MB), remembering that the Inactive RAM must be added to Free RAM as it can be used by any process the computer tosses at it.

 

[XheartcoreboyX]

What app are you using to download the music? You seem to have plenty of available RAM (950MB), remembering that the Inactive RAM must be added to Free RAM as it can be used by any process the computer tosses at it.

just by safari.. =)

 

[ab2650]

so im doing nothing except downloading 8 mp3 files from the net + safari +itunes opened(no music playing)..but my mbp(2.4 ghz,2gb ram) is running really hot and look at the cpu and ram read!!

Edit:im running on battery and its running down like fast!! cycles:12 its new.

Fire up terminal.app and play around with "ps"
run "ps auxm" to get all processes, with details, sorted by memory usage.
run "ps auxr" for the same sorted by CPU usage.

Make sure you terminal window is big, and you can see the "command" that is eating up resources; it's a path to the binary of the application usually.

you can also use "top" in the terminal to get a auto-refreshing view of much the same info.

 

[RichL]

I've noticed this too recently with iStat. I've come to the conclusion that it's the main reason OS X seems to be a little faster that Windows. All the OS does is index already opened programs so when you reopen them they are preloaded and boot quicker. On the other hand, when you only have 23MB of RAM left, as I sometimes do, opening new programs takes a few seconds because it has to clear the "inactive memory."

This is just a Windows users educated guess of the situation. I've been considering going with the 4GB RAM upgrade because of this. My MBP always has a few programs running. On average: Web browsers (3+ tabs), p2p, torrents, Adium, iTunes, and Ventrilo.

Now, on to search for more RAM...

 

[Zel]

It takes no time to clear inactive memory, it has already been written to disk or otherwise marked unneeded, so when a new app goes to request some ram it can just instantly use that part.

 

[mad jew]

This is just a Windows users educated guess of the situation. I've been considering going with the 4GB RAM upgrade because of this. My MBP always has a few programs running. On average: Web browsers (3+ tabs), p2p, torrents, Adium, iTunes, and Ventrilo.

Now, on to search for more RAM...

For the record, P2P apps and torrent apps are notorious for using up a lot of RAM.

 

[0939084]

Really easy way to check: in your utilities folder open the Activity Monitor and use that to find out.

 

[snowmoon]

Safari is the worst offender.... plugins and tabbed browsing makes it much worse. If you turn off everything ( java, plugins, tabbed browsing, plugins ) it might actually go two or three days between needing to be restarted because of the amount of "real" RAM it's consuming.

Anytime safari goes over 500MB of real memory it's time to restart it or face the wrath of a loced up system.