Soo I have that iStats widget in use right now. My question is:
Under memory ther are a few things:
Wired
Active
Inactive
Free
What do all these categories mean?
Wired Memory that cannot be paged out to the backing store on disk. Usually restricted to OS related stuff like drivers.
Active Belongs to a running process/application, but not wired.
Inactive The process that was using it was quit, but the memory map is retained just in case you fire that process/app up again. A nice potential launch timesaver.
Free Totally unclaimed. Left long enough inactive memory will turn into free memory because other apps will eat the existing free memory and then the inactive stuff is cannibalized.
Free memory is wasted memory. As long as wired + active stays less than 90% of your total you should not have too much in the way of VM paging slowdowns.
Comments
Hey all -
Soo I have that iStats widget in use right now. My question is:
Under memory ther are a few things:
Wired
Active
Inactive
Free
What do all these categories mean?
Wired Memory that cannot be paged out to the backing store on disk. Usually restricted to OS related stuff like drivers.
Active Belongs to a running process/application, but not wired.
Inactive The process that was using it was quit, but the memory map is retained just in case you fire that process/app up again. A nice potential launch timesaver.
Free Totally unclaimed. Left long enough inactive memory will turn into free memory because other apps will eat the existing free memory and then the inactive stuff is cannibalized.
Glad I got that extra gig of ram then - at any given time I seem to have under a gig of free.