[tonfisk]

Hi,

I am new here. Actually I searched possible answers to my question on google and then was directed to here. After doing a search in the forum I decide to post my question because it is not answered. Please help!

I am on a 2Ghz Macbook with 1G ram. It used to start up very quickly without any problem. But recently (probably after updated to 10.4.10) it starts up much slower. And I notice in the Activity Monitor that the Inactive Memory soars from 123m up to over 600m, and then drops and stays at around 500m, immediately after I startup the computer and before I have started ANY application! Could anyone tell me why it is so? And at the same time, whenever I turn on Opera after the startup, the little O jumps for over 20 times on the dock before it is ready to go, and for Firefox the spinning beach ball comes up ...

Could anyone please help with this? I am kind of bothered by such a situation.

Thank you in advance for suggestions!

[reader50]

How big is your HD, and how much free space is left? You may be running near full. Anything above 80% isn't good, going above 90% full will result in heavy fragmentation and slowdowns.

Inactive memory isn't a problem in itself. It is RAM that is free, but that used to be in use. Essentially, it's a form of smart disk cache. Your system will use inactive RAM as needed.

[tonfisk]

Yes the part used for system of my HD is about 45G and it still has about 13G free ... so I guess the space shall not be creating problems yet.

As is mentioned, Inactive memory is the RAM that used to be in use. And I am worrying simply because my inactive memory goes all the way high already after the startup, before any applications start to use any Ram, yet. Does that sound strange?

[Tomchu]

I've seen my MBP do that a few times. I wouldn't worry about it if the memory is being released.

[reader50]

It is unusual for Inactive to soar right after startup. It's also not right for apps to take a really long time to launch. Something is reading a bunch off your HD right after bootup, then discarding the data afterwards. Set Activity Monitor to Show All Processes, then quit it. Now add Activity Monitor to your Login Items.

System Preferences -> Accounts pane -> (select your account if need be) -> Login Items

This way Activity Monitor will open as soon as possible after boot, and you may catch whatever is doing a bunch of reading off the HD. The first suspect that comes to mind is Spotlight, it may be mixed up and reindexing a big folder on every bootup.

The app slowdowns may be because something is still accessing the HD, trying to monopolize the disk interface. Or, it may be time lost to the Inactive RAM being freed up. Normally, reusing inactive doesn't produce a delay, but it can if the inactive consists of many thousands of small blocks. Which again, could happen with a drive indexer.

[tonfisk]

Thank you Reader50. I followed your suggestion and put Activity Monitor on startup. Then I noticed a process called update_prebindin that consumes a lot of CPU and memory at the startup. Searching it on Google returns other people's similar reports and also gives me a solution . It is a problem of APE -- though I never installed this thing, it is bounded with the logitech control center which I installed (and then quickly uninstalled) on my macbook weeks ago. So I went to Unsanity website to download the latest version of APE, and used that image to do a complete uninstall on my macbook. Now the laptop starts much more reasonable ... I have a lot of green memory now. Very happy! Thanks again!