memory dissapearing

cecilb.demented

i remember reading about something like this happening but i have no idea where.



i have 1.12 ram in my g4, and for some reason, since a few days ago, it ALL gets eaten up.



i have "memory usage getter" (and ive tried other memory monitors as well). i add up all of the open applications ram usage and it doesnt add up to the total thats being taken up.



whats going on? why is my ram dissapearing like that? right now i only have mail, internet explorer, and memory usage getter on and its taking up over 700mb....



ive been using process wizard for a about a month now if it can have anything to do with it, but its never done this before.



PS. im using 10.1.5



[ 08-17-2002: Message edited by: cecilb.demented ]</p>

defiant

I think that has to with OS 10, and how it handles RAM. It uses a lot for Virtual Memory.

But it's still a little bit confusing.

ask brad, maybe he knows.

xaqtly

It may not be a problem, memory works differently in OS X - It's not like OS 9 at all, where loss of memory would lead to not being able to open other programs - in OS X, memory is allocated to programs that need it, and then it reserves that memory in the same state so that even if you close the program, next time you open it, it will be faster because all the commonly used instructions are stored in memory already. So if you switch programs a lot or do things that take up a lot of memory, you will see memory usage go real high and stay there.



That doesn't mean there's a problem though - OS X dynamically allocates memory as it needs it. It will continue to cache memory for applications that have used it until you start running low, at which point it will start returning cached memory and making it available to currently running apps that may need it. Since you have so much memory available, what you described seems normal to me for OS X. If you were talking about OS 9, I would be concerned. But OS X's memory management is much smarter and more efficient than OS 9's... and it will use every byte of memory available to make things run faster if it can.



I recently upgraded from 256 MB to 768, and I noticed a huge increase in speed when opening and closing programs, when switching between programs and doing multiple things in multiple programs. Warcraft 3 is a good example. It requires a lot of memory. When I had 256, almost all of it would go to running Warcraft. When I quit and went back to the Finder, I found that it had given up all the physical memory stored up for the Finder and given it to Warcraft, so it actually took a while to quit Warcraft and redraw the Finder. There was a lot of disk access and a lot of memory reallocation involved, and it actually took about 5-7 seconds just to get the Finder going again after quitting WC3.



After bringing it up to 768 MB, I don't have that problem any more. WC3 gets all the memory it wants and when I quit the Finder comes up instantly, just like every other program, because it's using as much memory as it takes to keep everything cached in physical memory.



I can't say for sure that's what's happening in your case, but it sure sounds like OS X's normal modus operandi to me.

cecilb.demented

thanks guys!