[KidKit]

Hey all,

Got a question as I'm not too familiar with memory thingies and couldn't find my answer from my searches of these forums.

From Activity Monitor, I noticed that when I use my mac normally over the course of a couple of days, an increasing proportion of my memory gets listed as "inactive" (that counts as used according to activity monitor), and the amount of "free" memory decreases over the same time till almost nil. I usually reboot my computer at this stage, just in case.

Is this normal or is it inidicative that I have buggy program somewhere? A memory chip problem? Quitting all my running apps doesn't free up all the memory that gets listed as "inactive" ... Btw, my specs are powerbook G4 12" 1ghz, 768mb ram, OSX 10.3.2.

Thks in advance you all!

[Mike Pither]

I find that Panther gradually "eats up" a huge chunk of my free memory. On my iMac after a week or so it uses up around 610mb leaving me with 40ish free. My PB with 1gig tops out with about 800mb used. After this it doesn't seem to get any worse unless I do something very memory intensive, even then after I have finished the extra is always released back.

It wasn't like this in Jaguar for me but whether it's normal or not I couldn't say

[Ganesha]

Free memory = wasted memory

[Mike Pither]

maybe free memory is wasted memory but not when you open a 0.5mb with everything else closed and your harddisc starts thrashing as it starts paging out.

[eevyl]

This has been answered so many times already, I did once please read:

RAM types in Activity Monitor (wired, inactive)

[KidKit]

Ahh... thanks for pointing the thread out! I didn't do a good job of searching the forums