[larrinski]

I use menu meters and have noticed after reboot that my memory usage is in the 300Mb range. I'm fine with that. After running for a day or so, my used memory is showing over 700Mb. Activity monitor shows my kernel at 80Mb. I am worried that my failed attempt at installing Fink on my intel mac is causing some problems. Firefox 1.5.0.2 seems to use a lot of Ram as well. I rarely leave more than 5 or 6 programs running at once. I always close iphoto and iweb as they seem to use a lot of Ram. Is this amount of Ram usage normal? And how about the Ram used by my kernel-task?

[stefanicotine]

it's not abnormal. I usually have Adium, itunes, and safari open and I find i'm using about 250-400 megs of ram. I'm so used to using Windows and only being able to have 2 or 3 apps open at once that I haven't quite "adapted" to my iMac's multitasking capabilities like you have ^_^

How much ram do you have total?

[mduell]

Free memory is a waste of money; you want it all used. Modern operating systems (at least Windows and OSX, I'm not sure about Linux) use otherwise unused memory to cache files from the disk to improve performance and responsiveness.

It may be worthwhile to check activity monitor and make sure you don't have any apps leaking memory (Firefox is notorious for it's memory leaks, so you probably want to close and reopen it ever few days), but having all your memory used is a good thing.