[BWSchultz]

Hi,

I have a question about the RAM in my PowerMac G5, 1.8Ghz. I started with the standard 512 from Apple and later added 1 GB from crucial.com for a total of 1.5 GB. I'm running the most current OS, 10.3.6, I believe, but I've been noticing this problem for quite some time.

I often do video compression and this obviously takes a lot of CPU power; thank goodness for the mac. My available RAM starts out high, I compress the video, OS X allocates more RAM to use for this process, and eventually my RAM goes down to about 15 MB in the activity monitor. Now, when I quit compressing the video, the memory does not recover and I'm stuck at 15 MB RAM until I reboot, no matter what other progams I stop using. I can still start apps but everything runs slow because OS X has to move memory all over the place. Is this normal? Can I tell OS X not to gobble up all the RAM for one process, leaving me with little to do anything else, such as email or a browser?

Also, is activity monitor an accurate representation of memory? I assume it is but the memory in use never gets close to adding up to 1.5 GB. It's probably something I just don't understand about RAM. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
bws

[Catfish_Man]

Then general rule of unix memory management is "unused ram is wasted ram". I wouldn't worry about it unless you're noticing a lot of lag (although, if you leave your machine running a mem intensive task, then stop it and do a bunch of other stuff, it will have to copy all that stuff back from the disk. I notice this after my brother has tried to calculate the number of atoms in the Tokyo or whatever the heck it is that he does with Mathematica.

[BWSchultz]

I'm fine with the idea of "unused memory being wasted memory" but I'm getting too many beachballs after I perform a memory intensive task. Mozilla/Safari will be much slower than normal, even if they are the only program running, and they occasionally crash, too. That's what bothers me. After I complete video compression, I quit all programs, and I still have only 15 MB of RAM (~1%) which means my computer runs kind of slow, if you can imagine.

Do others have this experience with OS X where you are running with virtually no RAM available all the time? I feel that adding more RAM won't do anything either since that will just be gobbled up by these memory-intensive programs, too.

[Big Mac]

What program are you using? It sounds like it has a serious memory leak. When you look in Activity Monitor, does the unavailable RAM show has inactive, active or wired? Please give us additional details.

[d.fine]

Try running something like MacJanitor , works for me to free all available memory ... try it out.

I work with 2GB DDR and do not have a similar problem. After heavy photoshop use all memory (or most of it) is released.

[BWSchultz]

I will give macjanitor a try tonight and check back then with more info.

Thanks, guys.