OSX takes up 208 MB RAM?

boi

boi

official breaker of macs.
running only the terminal ('top'), OSX takes up 208 MB of RAM.
is this right? it seems like quite a bit. these things are running.
top
tcsh
terminal
ituneshelp
windowshade
systemUISe
dock
finder
pbs
slpd
loginwindow
cron
securitySe

nothing is taking over 0.0% CPU load, except top is taking 6.5%. how do i tell how much RAM each one is taking? my system is slowing down quite a bit.

any ideas?

- boi.
 
This is most likely because you have already opened a number of applications before taking the memory snapshot. This is important because of how Mac OS X allocates memory. If you have a ton of memory available like me (896 megs of RAM), all the RAM that is used for an application gets marked as "inactive" when the application is quit, but in top, it still is counted as used memory. The reason for this implementation (which is inherent to UNIX, and thus to OS X) is that if you decide to open that application again, the resources do not need to be paged back into memory, making subsequent starts of that application much faster (which is normal of what you see in OS X -- frequently OmniWeb opens in 10 bounces at first launch, but like 5-7 on subsequent launches).

So what you should do is restart your computer, and then immediately launch the terminal and take the memory snapshot. This is what is typical of system use, and will probably be much lower than the 200 or so MB you reported before.
 
You can use something like "Memory Monitor" or "Memory Stick", both available from www.versiontracker.com, or you could just open the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities), and type "top". To stop the monitoring, just type Control-C.
 
Originally posted by boi

nothing is taking over 0.0% CPU load, except top is taking 6.5%. how do i tell how much RAM each one is taking? my system is slowing down quite a bit.

any ideas?

- boi.
Click to expand...

Here's some code from my top:

Code: 
  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
 4670 Mozilla     36.3% 20:26.19   7    91   623  34.9M  24.6M  48.0M   114M
  338 Terminal    35.2%  3:43.76   5   114   243  2.46M+ 8.23M  5.31M+ 58.8M
 4565 iTunes       9.1%  5:37.78   8   136   181  6.41M  10.1M  10.3M  61.1M
 5298 top          5.5%  0:01.73   1    14    14   224K   320K   464K  1.37M
  310 Window Man   3.3% 41:31.04   3   262   290  1.86M  28.0M  28.5M  44.8M
  334 CPU Monito   3.3% 23:51.96   1    64    78  1.10M  5.77M  2.77M  51.7M
 3626 CCacheServ   3.3%  4:37.66   1    21    20   292K  2.11M   884K  5.36M

RPRVT is the amount of ram you app needs to itself. RSHRD is the amount of RAM that it's using and sharing with other apps. (It may access libraries that other apps also access). RSIZE is the total RAM that it's using.

It's odd that the numbers almost never add up. Still, it's a good guideline.

Vanguard
 
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