When RAM is inactive computer speed is questionable. Most of users are having a hard time with it and machine is getting very sluggish. Its weird there is anything we need to do about inactive RAM but it looks like its not going to be solved so OSX takes care about it itself. If you are an intelligent computer user, you should do a reboot once every other day, if not everyday.
Fundamental elements here. After rebooting your inactive memory is cleared and only used if you begin to call on your hard drive. When your mac stores information as inactive memory, it will speed your system up, not slow it down. Lastly, and most importantly, when your mac needs the additional RAM, it simply takes it from inactive, thus you must be experiencing other speed related issues.
Feel free to post your running processes and I will take a look, but I do not think it is fair to tell our friends at Apple to fix something that essentially was a fix to begin with. Thank you for this great info. I looked this up after I realized there were 4 different things… I opened it to figure out why a flash game made my new MacBook slow.
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What's the point of holding RAM for previously opened applications hoping that the user will open it again? This is clearly not the case. Inactive memory in essence, makes opening up formerly closed processes faster. If you find that the Mac OS is taking up too much memory you don't really need like from the dozens of tabs you opened on Safari or Chrome just use the 'purge' command in the Terminal. In OS X Mavericks just use 'sudo purge' instead you will need to input your password.
It shaves off precious seconds when you need to open something up again, but if you want to play a RAM intensive game or open a RAM hungry application I definitely suggest using the purge command. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Isn't Inactive memory a waste of resources? Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 1 month ago. Active 3 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 52k times. I'm looking for explanation of memory usage on my machine especially in light of the example in this screenshot below: I understand what is Free and Active means But what are the meanings of Wired and Inactive?
Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Engineers know better, you will go back to Facebook in a few minutes or re-launch Word after quitting it. The same things happen again and again on computers. Here is a real world example of how inactive RAM is used. Time A's start the third time with B running.
Improve this answer. Wow very complete answer for newcomer like me. Thank you very much, very appreciated : — GusDeCooL. Yup - I get to answer for everyone - once and for all, people can edit it to make it better and you get your answer.
Pretty cool idea for a web site where people can come and ask interesting questions. Beautiful answer! I wish they explained it like this in my OS class. Show 16 more comments. If you see page outs increasing then you should take action. Ernie Ernie 1 1 bronze badge.
I'm with you, Ernie The inactive memory seems to never get reclaimed. I have to use "purge" to reclaim the inactive memory, and get my system active again. This is the amount that has recently been used but is no longer required.
It may have been used by a recently quit process, or by an active one that no longer needs it, and is not required for use. The use of inactive RAM allows the system to more quickly relaunch those recently used processes, and therefore increase the speed of the system.
Instead of having to load the RAM contents from the hard disk, the system will just convert the inactive RAM back to being active. While this is beneficial to the system, it is a little deceptive when trying to determine the amount of free RAM on the system. At first glance this may appear as though I am completely out of memory; however, I have about MB of inactive RAM as well, meaning that overall I have MB available for use with new or reactivated system processes.
Despite this, some people still like to see green values and a larger free RAM amount. While we advise to allow the system to manage RAM for best performance, there are a couple of utilities you can use to make the green part of the memory pie chart as big as possible. If you have Apple's Computer Hardware Understanding Developer tools installed available from the Apple developer Web site--free, with registration , you should have the purge command installed, which can be run to free up some of the inactive memory.
The utility iFreeMem is useful for clearing out unused RAM by demanding as much RAM as possible from the system, forcing the system to write as much memory to disk as possible and otherwise clear the RAM, and reducing the overall memory footprint. We did a small review of iFreeMem , so be sure to check it out to see how it runs. Keep in mind that the combination of free and inactive RAM is still not the total available RAM in the system, because if you put high memory demands on the system, other program's active RAM will be progressively written to virtual memory so it can be freed for use.
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