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snapstorm · Jun 19, 2007, 06:57 AM

Hey, I have been noticing that there are times when activity monitor says that I am using almost all my RAM but when I tell it to "show all processes" and add up the individual line items under the "real" column I come nowhere close to using all my RAM. Is this expected behavior? If so why the discrepancy? Have other people observed similar issues? I have seen this on a MacBook and a MacBook Pro LED.

frdmfghtr · Jun 19, 2007, 12:29 PM

Take a look here; this should help answer your question and explain the different types of memory shown in the Activity Monitor.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

huxrules · Jun 27, 2007, 08:05 AM

Through the day my computer would fill up on "yellow" or active memory. When I shut down all of my programs this memory would still stick around. I would have to log out and log back in to get rid of it. This is a symptom of a memory leak and I wasn't sure what program was doing it. So throughout the last week I've been shutting down programs to see if anything would help. Well a few days ago I turned off Activity Monitor. I just flip it on occasionally to check my memory. It seems to have done the trick. Now my active memory goes away when I'm not using it. I'm not a software engineer but it seems that activity monitor has a memory leak.

Pretty funny because its the program that is typically used to look for memory leaks. (besides the high test stuff).

HUX

huxrules · Jun 27, 2007, 09:36 AM

Just after writing that message I tried it again. Shut down all programs and see how much active memory remained. It was still to high for my liking. So possibly its not all activity monitor's fault. Should their be 600m of active memory when everything is off (including the doc and dashboard)- I dont think so. The largest program is kernal_task and its only taking 120Meg. Something is leaking.

larkost · Jun 28, 2007, 10:05 PM

No... it is very unlikely that something is leaking... and my guess is you only have a vague understanding of what a memory leak is. This is not a symptom of a memory leak.

What you are seeing is probably the disk cache. Unless you really know what you are doing when looking at memory, you will probably read it wrong in MacOS X. Let the memory manager do what it does best (and far better than we could do) and concentrate on something else.