TOO Much FREE Memory ???

G

gypsyrover

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TOO Much FREE Memory!
With 512 MB installed I rarely use moru than 354 MB according to Menu Meters (MM), and that seems true for I hear an awful lot of paging going on. This paging out is a PITA. Sometimes MM shows ovuer 1k of such activity!
Currently the reading is
Memory pages > 298.8 MB
Wired > 54.3
Inactive > 148.3
Free > 11.6
These figures do change, but very little, except downward as fewer apps are running.
I have nine going now, adding more does littly to increase usage. memtest found nothing amiss.
iMac 500hz

Has anyone a suggestion???
 
Try Memorystick and see how that pages out, I can have 50mb free and won't hear a constant paging unless there is a spike by a large file i'm editing or opening.
 
Has anyone a suggestion???
Click to expand...
Yes. Give your RAM to me.

just kidding. Actually, I have a gig of ram on my PowerBook, and according to menu-meters, I too, have "too much" RAM.
 
My principle concern is the large proportion of INACTIVE memory . That seems to be the cause of general sluggishness. Memorystick is not (yet) for me, with Jaguar, but Thanks.

Here's the paging data>
 

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you have 11.6mb of ram free and you think you have too much?

you are paging out because you are out of ram.
 
18 swap files at once! No wonder your system seems a little sluggish. More memory should certainly help, but better to discover what processes are causing all those page-outs.
Your Process Monitor or Activity Monitor (I forget what that's named in Jaguar) will show you where you memory is going. Also, running a top command in terminal can really show what's happening, instead of some overall numbers in a memory monitor app.
Your iMac will take 2 512 MB sticks of ram for a total of 1 GB. Perhaps that would help out the most, but you also may have a process that is simply crunching your memory use. (Maybe some Classic apps, Classic can really whack your virtual memory, if you don't have sufficient real RAM.)
 
There's such a thing as "system cache" memory, I'm not definite if it's also called "inactive" memory. The idea behind system cache is the OS will store things you might use frequently so that it'll load quicker. Kinda like loading an app, it'll load up faster the second time around within a short period of time of opening/closing. The app sits in system cache so it loads a little faster. But if your OS detects that memory is needed by another application it will (read: should) flush the cache, or move the cache into the page file so the other apps can get at physical memory.
 
I guess that the only way to reduce Inactive Memory is to reduce the number of open or sleeping = hidden app's. Seems strange, tho, that just a few can take up all that memory.
 
No, it's not really 'taking up all that memory', it's inactive! (meaning: not active) when the OS needs the memory it simply uses it. It's my understanding that the various processes that are open have a certain amount of memory alloted because of the nature of the process, but the memory is not reserved, the OS provides a process whatever memory is needed when the process becomes active (most processes are active for only limited amounts of time); otherwise, the memory (inactive) is used partially by the OS to cache that process, which may be used at a later time by the OS, or released to use by another process. All this is handled nicely by the OS. I suppose that as more processes are opened, the inactive memory portion would increase proportionally.
I would be more concerned about all those swapfiles. You should investigate which individual apps or processes are taking over your system. (or add to your installed RAM, which would also help)
 
I also have 512 MB RAM and find performance can become sluggish if just a few too many applications are left open. Closing unused apps to reclaim memory space is a reasonable way to maintain performance. Of course, rebooting will give you back the most space possible...

From the Help file of Memory Usage Getter, by Simone Manganelli:

"Memory Usage in Mac OS X

With UNIX underneath the user interface, we now have a Macintosh operating system that has a very modern and very efficient memory management system.

No longer do we have to manually assign the amount of memory we want to assign to a specific application. Mac OS X's memory management system dynamically assigns memory to applications, so if an application needs more memory to perform intensive tasks, Mac OS X will automatically assign it more memory (without having to relaunch the application). The effect? No more applications complaining about the lack of memory, and no more "Out of Memory" errors.

In addition, if a computer doesn't have enough physical memory for an application, Mac OS X will automatically switch to virtual memory, allowing the application to rely on disk space for its memory. This, of course, makes the application run much more slowly, but this feature of Mac OS X eliminates the need to manually turn on virtual memory. The amount of disk space used for virtual memory also is dynamically assigned based on the needs of open applications.

Another benefit of Mac OS X is the fact that there is no requirement for a contiguous block of memory. Mac OS X therefore can use all of the available physical memory for an application before resorting to virtual memory. Furthermore, memory assigned to each application is protected from other memory segments, preventing application crashes from totally taking down the system.

With these features, Mac OS X provides a much more stable and much more efficient operating system.

However, it should be noted that Mac OS X's memory management system is not without its downsides. The biggest change from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X is that the system and its applications use up a LOT more memory. Mac OS X's system requirements state that it needs 128 MB of RAM, but many people recommend a minimum of 512 MB for Mac OS X to run acceptably. This amount is subjective, but one thing is for sure: the more RAM that is made available to Mac OS X, the faster it runs.

Also, Mac OS X tends to eat up all available memory, even if there is a lot of it available. This is because Mac OS X caches as much data as it can in memory, so that it can potentially reuse that data without having to re-cache it (the UNIX term for caching data in memory is "paging in" memory). Mac OS X's performance drops when all available memory is used, because it has to start removing things from memory ("paging out"), which has a performance hit. This problem is much more prevalent in Mac OS X because applications are not limited to a specific amount of memory; they just take as much as they need, so free memory dwindles fast."

M.U.G. has pretty much been incorporated into Activity Viewer in Panther. There is additional info in the FAQs:

http://tinyurl.com/235rw
 
gypsyrover said:
I guess that the only way to reduce Inactive Memory is to reduce the number of open or sleeping = hidden app's. Seems strange, tho, that just a few can take up all that memory.
Click to expand...
Open your Terminal.app and do a "sudo top" you'll see a lot of processes running that you may not know about. Oh, and that list might just be a partial list as the terminal doesn't have enough "lines" to display everything.
 
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