4 GB of RAM (I know..., I have an 8 kit on the table ready to install). Only Safari and Calculator running and I have 347 MB free. I had chrome running earlier. why does OS X 10.6 uses so much memory? why do we need 8 or 16 GB these days, and sometimes we need to run things like "Free Memory"?

You don't have to use things like "Free Memory". As to why it can use that much memory, it is because OS X and applications will use available RAM to cache items. The important numbers are "Free" and "Inactive" memory, the total of those two is the amount available to be used by any process as needed. Read the Apple Support article, [support.apple.com], on what the different numbers reported for memory usage mean.

P.S. I am posting this from my Black MacBook which is limited to 4 GB of RAM. I may not be able to run as many applications simultaneously as on my iMac with 12 GB, but it works quite well with several open at once.

Edit: Link added



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/03/2012 11:14AM by JoeH.

If you thnk X.6 is bad on Memory, don't even bother with X.7! I recently went back to Snow after watching my system to grind to a halt!

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San Antonio, TX (in the old city)

"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

What JoeH said. I currently gave 2 GB installed in my Mini running 10.6.8 and with iTunes, Mail, Camino, Calculator and Activity monitor running, my Free+Inactive Memory = 890 MB.

A better indication that you don't have enough memory installed to run your apps efficiently is the Memory Page Outs from Activity Monitor - it should be less than a few hundred MB for the best performance.

3 GB on my work MBP.

currently have Mail and JDownloader running, plus some menu bar apps.

just quit Firefox and ran the Purge utility.

Something changed in later versions of 10.6 to match 10.7's memory management.
JoeH, you haven't been at a mac that starts to bog when it's used up most of that 4 GB. You do have to use apps like Free Memory to get things moving again.

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MR/F Guestmap: [www.mapservices.org]

Quote
space-time
4 GB of RAM (I know..., I have an 8 kit on the table ready to install). Only Safari and Calculator running and I have 347 MB free. I had chrome running earlier. why does OS X 10.6 uses so much memory?

There is no free memory in Mac OS X. The OS controls all of it.

Quote
Black
Something changed in later versions of 10.6 to match 10.7's memory management.
JoeH, you haven't been at a mac that starts to bog when it's used up most of that 4 GB. You do have to use apps like Free Memory to get things moving again.

Black, I have had as little as less than 10 MB of free memory, my system did not "bog". If yours was, there were other issues going on. And yes, I am fully updated on 10.6.

Quote
space-time
4 GB of RAM (I know..., I have an 8 kit on the table ready to install). Only Safari and Calculator running and I have 347 MB free. I had chrome running earlier. why does OS X 10.6 uses so much memory? why do we need 8 or 16 GB these days, and sometimes we need to run things like "Free Memory"?

Use Activity Monitor to provide RAM usage as a Dock icon. When the green section gets uncomfortable for you (blue increases), open Terminal and just type purge Hit Return and wait 5 seconds or so, watching the Dock icon. Then grin.

"Purge" command will cause very short term delays in app response, but only momentarily.

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Mr. Curmudgeon, on Mountain Lion.

Thanks, but I get

-bash: purge: command not found

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space-time
Thanks, but I get

-bash: purge: command not found

The Free Memory command in Free Memory probably does the exact same thing, so why bother?

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MR/F Guestmap: [www.mapservices.org]

Quote
JoeH

Quote
Black
Something changed in later versions of 10.6 to match 10.7's memory management.
JoeH, you haven't been at a mac that starts to bog when it's used up most of that 4 GB. You do have to use apps like Free Memory to get things moving again.

Black, I have had as little as less than 10 MB of free memory, my system did not "bog". If yours was, there were other issues going on. And yes, I am fully updated on 10.6.

Of course, yes, when you end up heavily into HDD usage for VM, and your hard drive performance is not optimal for whatever reason (full, fragmented, whatever) then yeah, technically "something is wrong." So if I want to run a little command every few days from a top-bar pulldown, and that gets things unbogged, what's so horrible?
Anyways, now that I'm booting from an external SSD I don't get the bogging.

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MR/F Guestmap: [www.mapservices.org]

So if I want to run a little command every few days from a top-bar pulldown, and that gets things unbogged, what's so horrible?

I wanted to know why we need such programs or terminal commands in 10.6 when we didn't seem to need those in prior OS X versions.

i think the Purge command only works with Dev tools installed.

i use this:
[www.macupdate.com]

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[www.giyf.com]

Quote
space-time
So if I want to run a little command every few days from a top-bar pulldown, and that gets things unbogged, what's so horrible?

I wanted to know why we need such programs or terminal commands in 10.6 when we didn't seem to need those in prior OS X versions.

I remain convinced that it happened ilate in 10.6, maybe with the 10.6.8 release-- last fall we had a wave of threads from one forum user after another, complaining that their 1-2 year old macs suddenly had lots of spinning beachballs, common thread all on 10.6.8 and with 4 GB of RAM installed.

I would also be interested in the nuts and bolts of what specific changes were made. Thus far no-one on this forum has been able to provide an answer. May be necessary to post somewhere where there is a greater percentage of 'technical' folks. Or elect Jimmypoo to go do so and report back

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MR/F Guestmap: [www.mapservices.org]

Here is what Apple documents about the changes in 10.6.6, 10.6.7, and 10.6.8. Pretty much bug fixes to specific problems.

[support.apple.com]
[support.apple.com]
[support.apple.com]

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GGD
Here is what Apple documents about the changes in 10.6.6, 10.6.7, and 10.6.8. Pretty much bug fixes to specific problems.

[support.apple.com]
[support.apple.com]
[support.apple.com]

Thanks for the links.... have poked around before, and yeah, nothing listed relating to memory.

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MR/F Guestmap: [www.mapservices.org]

reinstall the Combo 10.6.8 update?

run OnyX and clean out some caches?

Safe Boot, then reboot again normally?

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[www.giyf.com]