[SOLIDAge]

I'm writing this in the MacBook forum because This doesn't happen on any of my other macs, or my friends.
For example
if i open iStats... and it says have 1gig free of RAM... i open iTunes, it'll drop down to 850megs free. I close iTunes...and it stays at 850megs. I'm constantly running around 1.90gigs being used because i'll open applications, close them but the memory doesn't seem to free itself up.

Does anyone else have this issue? or have an idea as to why it's happening?

[bishopazrael]

hmmm... I have activity monitor open when I log in and I've not noticed that kind of thing happening. Usually when I quit a program i get the memory back. Are you just closing the widow or are you quitting it from the menu?

[Tomchu]

That's called caching. :-P

Memory that is actively in use by a running application will fall under the Wired and Active categories (one or the other, or a bit of both, depending on the type of application). When you quit the application, the memory that was required for operation is released, but the memory that actually kept the executable image is marked as Inactive.

If you happen to start iTunes again, it'll start faster because not everything has to be re-read from the hard drive. When another program really needs more memory, it'll start taking from the portion of the Inactive pool that is caches.

A common phrase around these parts is "Unused memory is wasted memory". If you have 2 GB of memory in a computer, but you really only need 400 MB for what you're doing, wouldn't it be nice if those remaining ~1600 MB were used to speed things up a bit? That's exactly what all modern operating systems do. :-)

[bishopazrael]

Tom thanks for explaining that.... I've been trying to find a way of explaining it and that was perfect. Any problem with me quoting you?