Why does lion use so much memory?

Question

Why so much memory usage in Lion?  Have 8GB in Lion 10.7.2 (waiting on 7.3 until I can be assured it won't hose everything) and keep running out of memory without having anything but a browser open.  Currently do not have anything in background except a clipboard manager and am running Safari with 6 primarily text-based tabs--total memory usage:  2.63GB.  Comparable memory usage in Snow Leopard was around 900MB.  Have had memory climb up to all installed memory, though at that time I did have about twenty tabs open, some with Flash and othe multi-media, but, still, did not have comparable problems with Snow Leopard.  What gives?  Memory freeing and reclamation does not seem to be working efficiently either.  Have used Purge and FreeMemory to some benefit, but there seems to be something deeply wrong with the pool of inactive memory.  Also, either the kernal, or some other vital core piece of the OS, gets transferred out to Virtual Memory when the memory usage gets above 6GB...then machine crawls and I have to reboot.  Very unhappy, not sure I should have given up my Windows 7 machines for the Mac...they screamed speedily and had none of these problems.
Very disappointed with so much about Lion.  Only reason I upgraded from Snow Leopard was to get the vaunted hardware gains when running VMWare Fusion 4.  Other aspects are very bad--lots of crashes, software incompatibilities, lots of beachballs, generally sluggish performance, will not start screensaver, will not sleep, will not shut down properly--have to use power button...goes on and on....then death-dealing problems with 10.7.3 update...all going to **** now that Steve Jobs has moved on to other duties?  Trying to convince myself it will all work out, but not sure...trying to devise a de-migration path back to Snow Leopard that will not take me a hundred hours to implement.

Answer 1

Disconnect all wired peripherals except keyboard, mouse, and monitor, if applicable. Launch the usual set of applications you use when you notice the slowdown.
Step 1
Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the page that opens.
Select the CPU tab. Select All Processes from the popup menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.
Now select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?
Step 2
Launch the Console application in the same way as above, and select “kernel.log” from the file list. Post the dozen or so most recent messages in the log – the text, please, not a screenshot. If there are repeats, please post only one example of each repeated message.