Inactive memory is growing until there is no free memory

Recently something happened and inactive memory commence growing from time to time. Even if I do nothing and have no application running. File cache eats all free memory (24Gb) in a couple of minutes and then OS is getting too slow.
sudo purge helps, sometimes after purging cache stops growing and sometimes I have to purge a few times.
Two month ago there was no such a behavior, I have no idea what's happened to the OS.
ps. sorry, had to post again to this community, cannot to move from Safari community

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Hardware Information: ℹ️
 iMac (27-inch, Late 2012) (Technical Specifications)
 iMac - model: iMac13,2
 1 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU: 4-core
 24 GB RAM Upgradeable
 BANK 0/DIMM0
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 BANK 1/DIMM0
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 BANK 0/DIMM1
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 BANK 1/DIMM1
 8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz ok
 Bluetooth: Good - Handoff/Airdrop2 supported
 Wireless: en1: 802.11 a/b/g/n
Video Information: ℹ️
 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M - VRAM: 512 MB
 iMac 2560 x 1440
System Software: ℹ️
 OS X 10.9.5 (13F34) - Time since boot: 3:41:20
Disk Information: ℹ️
 APPLE HDD WDC WD10EALX-408EA0 disk0 : (1 TB)
 EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted> : 210 MB
 Macintosh HD (disk0s2) / : 999.35 GB (306.69 GB free)
 Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted> [Recovery]: 650 MB
USB Information: ℹ️
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 Apple Inc. Bluetooth USB Host Controller
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 Mac App Store and identified developers
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Top Processes by CPU: ℹ️
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Top Processes by Memory: ℹ️
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 21.01 GB Inactive RAM
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 Apr 4, 2015, 04:19:03 PM Self test - passed

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Messaging Server 3.6x NscpMail process continues to grow until memory used up

After upgrading to Messaging Server version 3.6, I have found that the
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One solution to this problem is to remove the problematic messages. 

<OL>
<LI>Shut down the Messaging Server (see details
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<LI>Create these directories again for Messaging Server (see details below).

<LI>Re-start the Messaging Server (see details below)

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<HR>

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server root/control 
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Next time when this happen it will be great if you can create statspack snapshots during the problem. Then you will have more insight information of what's going on in Oracle.

OSX inactive memory management problems

On my 2010 Macbook Air 11" running OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, I have run into some major issues with memory management. This problem persists across both my Mac machines and multiple generations of OSX. I have a 2007 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro Running Lion (upgraded from Tiger) with 3 gb 667Mhz DDR2 RAM and my 2010 Air 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo (Upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion) with 2gb 1067mhz DDR3 RAM. On both machines, for some time now, during normal usage; especially web browsing using Chrome and Safari (respectively); the inactive RAM on both machines will grow to consume around 30% of all RAM and force time consuming page outs to the mass storage drives on both machines. The Pro has a slower hard drive and the problem is the worst here, the air has a much faster SSD. I have found myself constantly having a window of Activity Monitor up on at least one of my desktops watching my RAM usage, using terminal to purge ram upwards of 10 times an hour to prevent costly page outs, especially on the Pro. I know Apple claims that inactive RAM is essentially free RAM that is temporarily storing recently used information for ease of access later and that it's supposed to be released as free memory when needed, but this obviously is not happening. Right now on my air my swap file is over 650Mb and I've seen it top 2Gb before. The air is exponentially better than the Pro due to the faster SSD, but I do notice substantial UI lag and a massive drop in fluidity as soon as my meager 2Gb is full and I start paging. The Pro is another story entirely, the entire system will essentially become unusable, having to wait several seconds for mouse clicks to even register. That's why I upgraded the stock 2Gb of RAM it comes with to 3Gb hoping that a 150% increase in RAM would help, but it just prolonged the inevitable. I still end up paging out just as bad across both systems if un checked. Even when I keep a close eye on memory usage and purge often, I still end up paging out because I'm not vigilant enough.
I have to limit my browsing to less than 5 tabs and keep my number of open programs less than 2 on both machines. My active and wired memory rarely seem to top 70%, meaning the rest gets taken by inactive, which isn't functioning as Apple claims. Even if my conclusions aobut what is happening under the hood are incorrect, something is going terribly wrong. I can't upgrade the RAM on my Air at all, and the RAM on my Pro is capped at 4Gb. I'm holding on upgrading because I don't think the excess hardware will solve this software memory problem. Whatever is happening is causing a serious drop in performance for me (yes I do know I have underpowered machines), but there has to be something I can do to speed performance. I've read about disabling the dynamic page file entirely, which just seems to crash the system when free memory is gone, and I've read about programs that claim to free memory. Those programs seem to work by taking a high priority in the process heigharchy of the OS and then proceeding to eat up large portions of RAM and releasing them as needed in an attempt to replicate the true intentions of inactive RAM, but I've heard of problems with this method as well. Does anyone have a viable solution? Monitoring my RAM usage myself and ensuring I don't end up paging out is costly, time consuming, annoying, and inefficient since I fail to catch the problem before I page if I get particularly busy. There is no other OS I've ever been acquainted with that has this problem, not any flavor of Linux, not even the dreaded windows. I seriously hope Apple can do something to manage this runaway memory problem. I'd like to be able to open more than 3 windows in Safari. I've had to purge 3 seperate times while writing this on my Air, and I now have 678 inactive memory, 741 inactive, 582 wired, and less than 14Mb free out of 2Gb with a growing swap at 680Mb. Each purge becomes less and less effective and the last one I did freed up only about 100Mb and it got eaten up again by inactive in less than 10 seconds. On my Air, the memory hog is Safari right now at 700Mb between the web content and flash player with only Facebook, youtube, and this Apple Supprt tab open. I have NO other applications running in the fore or background other than Activity Monitor and Terminal. On my Pro the memory hog is always kernel task, I use Chrome and Safari both. While the memory used by the browser does not usually take up the most substantial portion of the total used RAM out of any process, the more tabs I open, the more RAM I use. The browser is usually the second heaviest RAM hog to Kernel Task. So it seems that across the two machines there are two lsightly different manifestations of the same problem with the same results: massive performance drops and extremely annoying and costly page outs no matter the reason. I just want this problem to go away. I've used underpowered windows laptops that can open a dozen tabs in a heavier browser like IE or Firefox while using other programs like Word or Excel and more with no memory lag issues. There's no way in **** I could manage to open that many pages in a browser while using Pages and/or Numbers on either of my machines and expect reliable (swap free performance). This is just kind of sad in my opinion. Does anyone have a way to get my OSX machine running smooth so that I can remove the one thing that windows and Linux fan boys get the right to laugh at my Macs for?

Hi Zephryl,
I was actually able to get an initial response from Sun on this a few months ago. However, the Sun Swing team has not followed up on a resolution for this pervasive problem, even though they noticed the same problem when running a test applet I had created for them. Apparently, I.E. is not releasing memory from the heap.
Below is a quote from a Sun rep. on this in an e-mail sent to me on Dec 4, 2002:
"I suspected the leak is in the native code because the # of handles and GDI objects keep increasing but no obvious Java objects are left behind in the Java heap during page switch."
So, until Sun and/or Microsoft work out a solution to this, anyone who uses I.E. 6 and applets for their UI seems to be in a lot of trouble.
As a note, trying to invoke the Garbage Collector does not do anything, but generally a very small amount of memory will be released (like maybe 5-10% of the memory allocated for the applet).
Cheers!
Avi Gray
Global Computer Enterprises

Inactive memory takes all the memory - please help

I have a Macbook Pro - August 2009, upgraded version to 2.66 MHZ, advance display card, Dual core.
I recently upgraded the RAM to 8GB (Kingston) to clear more memory for my massive application use, the thing is it didn't solve anything because the issue I had problems with - Inactive Memory, wasn't resolved.
Inactive memory supposed to hold the memory for the apps you closed in case you'll run them once again, but it NEVER clears the memory, I can see the "blue" color taking all the free mem and the computer slows down! no free mem what so ever.
Now the Inactive mem grows enormously and gets to be more than 4GB, it has the same effect, the memory runs out!
Is there a way to fix it? I'm going crazy with that.. what a terrible design!
iFreeMem doesn't work on the 8GB, I'm at a loss..
Please help!
Thanks,
Eli.

Sounds like you have never done a PRAM reset or a SMC reset. Do both and see if this helps:
_SMC RESET_
• Shut down the computer.
• Plug in the MagSafe power adapter to a power source, connecting it to the Mac if its not already connected.
• On the built-in keyboard, press the (left side) Shift-Control-Option keys and the power button at the same time.
• Release all the keys and the power button at the same time.
• Press the power button to turn on the computer.
_PRAM RESET_
• Shut down the computer.
• Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
• Turn on the computer.
• Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
• Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
• Release the keys.
Roger

Inactive memory. it's not working properly, how do i tweak the system to fix it?

hi.
my system has 24 gigabytes of ram. I use After effects and photoshop and illustrator... all day, every day, going back over 10 years.
when I run a particularly big project in AE, one that uses big fies, or a lot of files, the inactive ram very quickly balloons out of control.
prime example: I am rendering right now, it takes about 12 minutes to render the comp, in 12 minutes the system will go from zero megabytes of inactive ram, to 17 gigabytes, leaving me with no ram for the system, causing in some severe cases: actual hard crashes. I continually have to monitor and run a "purge" command in the terminal in order to cut that out.
the documentation and general discourse I've read agrees that inactive memory is the same thing as free memory, in that it is available for applications with need to use it. But, it contains potentially useful data that was recently used, and the system would rather give you the free stuff before giving you the inactive stuff.
here's the problem:
Aftereffects uses this memory, and then frees it. it's full of gibberish, it gets used quickly, and released quickly, and pooled into inactive memory. At this point it should be availible for other apps to use, and it isn't. it is treated as if it is in use. The system can't use it, aftereffects can't use it, no other app can get this ram allocated to it. Inactive memory, becomes terminal memory, memory that is not available for use by the system.
I know there has to be a system default or a setting in the terminal, I can set to make it trigger happy and automatically free up this useless memory.
what is it?

Inactive memory is the operating system cache.
This cache may contains data which has not been written to disk (called dirty pages). This is because Mac OS X defers flushing dirty cache data to disk to cut down on contantly starting up idle disks, consuming power, draining laptop batteries, and adding extra wear to solid state disks which have a limited number of writes.
When Mac OS X has lots of inactive memory and the system starts to slow down, this is because now the OS is being forced to write the dirty cached pages to disk before it can give those pages to another applications, or to reuse those pages with the same applciation.
After effects and photoshop and illustrator are very memory intensive apps.
...causing in some severe cases: actual hard crashes.
That is either a hardware problem, or an operating system bug. You should file a Bug report including your crash dumps to Apple.
BugReporter
<http://bugreporter.apple.com>
Free ADC (Apple Developer Connection) account needed for BugReporter.
Anyone can get a free account at:
<http://developer.apple.com/programs/register/>
Aftereffects uses this memory, and then frees it. it's full of gibberish, it gets used quickly, and released quickly, and pooled into inactive memory. At this point it should be availible for other apps to use, and it isn't. it is treated as if it is in use. The system can't use it, aftereffects can't use it, no other app can get this ram allocated to it. Inactive memory, becomes terminal memory, memory that is not available for use by the system.
The inactive memory may still be part of the After Effects address space, just not in the current process working set. That is to say, ever so often the operating system will mark pages inactive and see if the process references them again. If it does, they are put back in the process' working set (quickly because they are still in RAM and it just requies updating some process tables), otherwise they sit in inactive memory. If they are really part of After Effects address space, then chances are the data in those pages is dirty, and before they can be given to another process the pages have to be written to the /var/vm/swapfile(s).
If After Effects generated this inactive memory by reading files (and only reading), then those pages are clean (not dirty), and can easily be moved to free pages and given to a process as there is no need to write them back to disk, as the disk has the same values as what is cached.
If After Effects generated this inactive memory by writing data to files, then the pages are dirty and are waiting to be written to disk. Unless the file has been deleted after the write (such as a scratch file), then the operating system must write the data to disk before it can reuse the inactive pages. It does not matter if later the file will be deleted, the operating system does not know that, so it cannot give those pages to another process until they have been written to disk. The except being if and only if, a process is also accessing (reading or writing) that file, then cache starts to pay for itself.
The operating system does not refuse to give inactive memory to other processes, it just has responsibilities to make sure dirty pages are properly moved to stable storage before the pages are reused. And generally speaking stable storage is slow. Orders of magnitude slower.
If you want to control when you the operating system cleans dirty inactive memory, then you may continue to run the 'purge' command. As long as you are not running it non-stop, and especially if you are using a laptop or solid state disk.
Then again, getting more RAM will allow the operating system to dirty up more RAM before it needs to start flushing to disk. And replacing your disks with solid state disks (SSDs) will allow the operating system to flush dirty pages much faster when it needs to start cleaning the inactive memory.
Message was edited by: BobHarris

Inactive memory steadily increasing... but I am not even doing anything

These past two or three weeks, my Apple's memory has been getting occupied very quickly, causing my computer to run very slowly, and I have even received a "not enough memory" message. The thing is, I don't use it for any memory-intensive processes. I usually have my browser (Firefox), MS Word, and MS Excel open at the same time. (I would like to have iTunes on too, but I run out of memory!!). I tried Repairing my Disk Permissions because some website said I should -- it temporarily gave me a few hundred MB more of free memory, but did not seem to have a lasting impact. I noticed that Inactive memory was taking up the majority of my memory. My inactive memory creeps up by about 1 MB every 3 seconds, so by the time I finish this message, I may well run out of free memory, even though the only things I have open are Firefox and Activity Monitor. I also tried running the PURGE command in the terminal, but nothing changed. And of course I tried restarting, but to no avail.
Could it be that I recently installed calibre for my Kindle? Or what else might be going on? The situation seems to be worse every day. Also, I don't think there is any apple support office or store in the country I live in. I worry that soon my computer will run out of memory before I can even open any applications that might help me fix it!
I have MAC OSX 10.8.5, with a 2.6GHz Intel Core i5 processer, and 4 GB of memory.

I have even received a "not enough memory" message.
What is the exact, complete text of the message?

Difference between free and inactive memory?

I'm really just wondering what the difference is between inactive, and free memory. Right now, I have about 13MB of free memory, and 381MB of inactive memory. Is the inactive memory just on reserve in case the computer absolutely needs it? Is there any way to utilize this "inactive" memory to speed up the computer? Thanks.

Read the following:
About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Memory Management in Mac OS X
Performance Guidelines- Memory Management in Mac OS X
A detailed look at memory usage in OS X
Understanding top output in the Terminal
The amount of available RAM for applications is the sum of Free RAM and Inactive RAM. This will change as applications are opened and closed or change from active to inactive status. The Swap figure represents an estimate of the total amount of swap space required for VM if used, but does not necessarily indicate the actual size of the existing swap file. If you are really in need of more RAM that would be indicated by how frequently the system uses VM. If you open the Terminal and run the top command at the prompt you will find information reported on Pageins () and Pageouts (). Pageouts () is the important figure. If the value in the parentheses is 0 (zero) then OS X is not making instantaneous use of VM which means you have adequate physical RAM for the system with the applications you have loaded. If the figure in parentheses is running positive and your hard drive is constantly being used (thrashing) then you need more physical RAM.

In OSX Activity Monitor, what's the difference between 'free' memory and 'inactive' memory

In OS X Activity Monitor, what's the difference between 'free' memory and 'inactive' memory. My daughters 2Gb MacBook Pro is very slow, it probably needs more memory but there is almost 1Gb of 'inactive' memory but no 'free' memory when an application is opened.
Thanks

Free RAM is the one that has not been used by any application since you started up your Mac, and inactive RAM is the one that was used by an application and it is not in use anymore.
1 GB of inactive RAM is a lot, and it may be the cause of the slowness. There are a lot of apps that allows you to turn inactive into free RAM. I use FreeMemory, but have a look at the Mac App Store.
If you are a developer, you can do that with a command you can type into Terminal:
sudo purge

Memory leak versus inactive memory

Hi:
My iMac was becoming painfully slow a year or so ago. This seemed to be due to a lack of RAM, so I upgraded (2 GB to 4 GB total). This worked great, but now I seem to be running out of memory again, even when there are not a lot of programs open.
I’ve started tracking memory usage with Activity Monitor, and typically a huge chunk of my memory is “Inactive”. I.e., at this time I have 215 MB free, 450 MB Wired, 1.6 GB active, and 1.7 GB inactive. This despite only having Word, Outlook, OmniOutliner, Safari and iTunes open. Under System Memory (in Activity Monitor) it says Finder at 250 MB, Word at 131 MB, iTunes at 120 MB, Outlook at 80 MB, OO at 46 MB, and Dropbox at 34 MB (then a bunch of smaller usages). Even being very generous, the total memory usage only seems to add up to ~1GB, far short of the 4 GB installed.
I have no idea what a real “memory leak” actually is, but I’ve heard the term bandied about. I’ve had some weird, nonreproducible system crashes in the last few months where the system just totally freezes, often (but not always) putting a nice colour pattern on the monitors. Looking around, some folks have said that this might be due to a memory problem since everything else seems to check out AOK.
Thus, several questions:
Might I have a “memory leak”? If so, how do I diagnose and fix it?
What is the 1.7 GB of “inactive” memory being used for? Why is my Free memory so small when this big chunk of inactive memory is sitting there?
Thank you very much!
OS 10.8.2, 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

The way Safari accumulates memory is normal. The way it is trying to page the memory to disc and error-ing is not. I think the integrity of your disc volume / catalog and directories may be to blame.
Try a bit of basic maintenance:
Repairing permissions is important, and should always be carried out both before and after any software installation or update.
Go to Disk Utility (this is in your Utilities Folder in your Application folder) and click on the icon of your hard disk (not the one with all the numbers).
In First Aid, click on Repair Permissions.
This only takes a minute or two in Tiger, but much longer in Leopard.
Background information here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751
and here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302672
An article on troubleshooting Permissions can be found here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963
By the way, you can ignore any messages about SUID or ACL file permissions, as explained here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448?viewlocale=en_US
If you were having any serious problems with your Mac you might as well complete the exercise by repairing your hard disk as well. You cannot do this from the same start-up disk. Reboot from your install disk (holding down the C key). Once it opens, select your language, and then go to Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Select your hard disk as before and click Repair.
Once that is complete reboot again from your usual start-up disk.
More useful reading here:
Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417?viewlocale=en_US
For a full description of how to resolve Disk, Permission and Cache Corruption, you should read this FAQ from the X Lab:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html

Too Much Inactive Memory Useage

Hi,
I have a 2010 iMac running Mac OS X version 10.7.5.
I have upgraded to 16GB Ram but still have serious issues with the computer running slow sometimes are almost stopping because the memory usage seems to be too high.
I run quiet a few applications (mainly web browsers with multiple tabs). The main issue I see is the Inactive Memory is over 5GB. Is there a reason why this is so high? Is there a way to reduce the Inactive Memory?
Restarting the machine is a short term solution.
Thanks

Hi,
I have a 2010 iMac running Mac OS X version 10.7.5.
I have upgraded to 16GB Ram but still have serious issues with the computer running slow sometimes are almost stopping because the memory usage seems to be too high.
I run quiet a few applications (mainly web browsers with multiple tabs). The main issue I see is the Inactive Memory is over 5GB. Is there a reason why this is so high? Is there a way to reduce the Inactive Memory?
Restarting the machine is a short term solution.
Thanks

Inactive Memory leak in Safari 4.0.3

There is a memory leak in Safari 4.0.3. I haven't isolated it to a particular page since I usually have 15-20 tabs open when I notice the spinning ball, caused by VM paging. When this happens, according to Activity Monitor, Safari.app uses between 500-2000mb of "Real Memory", yet when I close it almost all of the blue "Inactive Memory" is released. The last time this happened, it freed 5.4gb.
This is getting annoying and is certainly bad for the SSD. Any idea if there's a fix?
BTW I've got the new Pro with 8 gigs of DDR3 and an SSD, and 20mbit FIOS internet... There is no excuse whatsoever for the spinning ball!

The way Safari accumulates memory is normal. The way it is trying to page the memory to disc and error-ing is not. I think the integrity of your disc volume / catalog and directories may be to blame.
Try a bit of basic maintenance:
Repairing permissions is important, and should always be carried out both before and after any software installation or update.
Go to Disk Utility (this is in your Utilities Folder in your Application folder) and click on the icon of your hard disk (not the one with all the numbers).
In First Aid, click on Repair Permissions.
This only takes a minute or two in Tiger, but much longer in Leopard.
Background information here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751
and here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302672
An article on troubleshooting Permissions can be found here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963
By the way, you can ignore any messages about SUID or ACL file permissions, as explained here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448?viewlocale=en_US
If you were having any serious problems with your Mac you might as well complete the exercise by repairing your hard disk as well. You cannot do this from the same start-up disk. Reboot from your install disk (holding down the C key). Once it opens, select your language, and then go to Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Select your hard disk as before and click Repair.
Once that is complete reboot again from your usual start-up disk.
More useful reading here:
Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417?viewlocale=en_US
For a full description of how to resolve Disk, Permission and Cache Corruption, you should read this FAQ from the X Lab:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html

WHY DO I HAVE SO MUCH ' INACTIVE ' MEMORY?????

i was just looking at the activity monitor seeing how much memory my applications were using up and i noticed a hugeee amount of inactive memory...
at the time i had thses applications running:
toast titanium PowerPC
azureus Intel
msn messenger PowerPC
and only 2 wigets Intel
the activity monitor showed (ish) 101mb wired
436mb active
471mb INACTIVE
30mb free
why is nearly half of my memory inactive??? how can i free this up?
thanks.

Inactive memory is memory previously being used up. Mac OS X uses a lot of RAM to its stunning, "always remembering what you did last," advantage. If you previously had Mail open, some RAM is used up. When you quit Mail, whatever you were doing last is stored in that Inactive (previously used) RAM. If you need the RAM (for another application), Mac OS will take from the Inactive RAM, if need be. There's absolutely nothing to worry about, it's 100% normal.

Allocated heap memory goes up even when there is enough free memory

Hi,
Our Java application's memory usage keep growing. Further analysis of the heap memory using JProbe shows that the allocated heap memory goes up even when there is enough free memory available in the heap.
When the process started, allocated heap memory was around 50MB and the memory used was around 8MB. After few hours, the inuse memory remains at 8MB (slight increase in KBs), but the allocated memory went upto 70MB.
We are using JVM 1.5_10. What could be the reason for heap allocation going up even when there is enough free memory available in heap?
-Rajesh.

Hi Eric,
Please check if there is any error or warning in the Event Viewer based on the data time?
If there is any error, please post the event ID to help us to troubleshoot.
Best Regards,
Anna

Inactive memory - I want to clear it.

I have a 2010 macbook pro with 6 gigs of RAM.
WHAT I KNOW: that inactive memory is the "same" as active memory; that inactive memory is basically cached information that can quickly be replaced when needed; that the system automatically regulates inactive and active memory.
Well that´s peachy, but it still causes problems.
THE SITUATION: I am a graphic designer, which means that I use photoshop a lot. Part of my job is the creation of gigantic publicity images which take up a lot of ram memory.
Lets suppose I make giant image A, save it, and then I close it. I make giant image B, save it, and close it. I make giant image C, save it, and close it. At this point, I have all my free memory taken up, and only have inactive memory left. Well, when I go to open up giant image A, it takes forever to load (10 to 20 minutes) and the computer slows to a crawl - even though there are no images or any other memory sucking programs open.
Or lets say that I have giant image A open, but I need to open giant image B and C. Same problem. Since I have no free memory, the system slows to a crawl. What has been my remedy? Force close photoshop, and reopen it. Upon doing this I have a ton of free memory, I can open images A, B, and/or C at the same time and they load at lightning speed (1 to 2 minutes, versus the 10 to 20 minute wait when my computer is relying on inactive memory).
WHAT I NEED: It is easy to say that this is all Adobe´s fault, or that the system´s regulation of memory is vastly superior to Windows, but that isn´t going to help me. What I need is an application, or technique where I can clear as much inactive memory as possible.
This is not a circumstance where I don´t understand what´s happening. I upgraded from 4 gigs of RAM to 6, and while the upgrade has helped it is only relieving a symptom of the problem and not the cause. In my line of work, I need to be able to work quickly and not have to rely on whether my system knows when to replace cached information.

I didn´t upgrade to 8 gigs of ram because I have an imac from 2007 with 4 gigs that does just fine. I needed a laptop and so decided on the macbook pro. As the macbook is newer, I imagined that it would go faster. I didn´t take into account that the new 10.6 system would need more memory, and that Adobe CS 5 would need much more memory than Adobe CS 4 - so I upgraded the memory a bit to make up for the difference.
I could buy even MORE memory, but it isn´t reasonable that a computer that´s 3 years old should be faster than the newest model professional laptop with the newest system and the newest applications. What´s more, I do not NEED more memory as the images I need to edit load very quickly whenever I free up inactive memory by force quitting photoshop. The fact that the images load quickly when there´s free memory, and slowly when there´s only inactive memory is proof that the RAM memory regulation is ineffective.
I do admit that this problem only occurs when I am creating large high quality images, and that memory regulation is not an issue 70% of the time. BUT since I´ve spent the last 2 weeks working on high quality images that measure 3x3 meters, I need a solution that will allow me to free up inactive memory.

Memory Issue - Inactive Memory?

Been having an out of memory issue with Capture One Pro. When i have the Activity Monitor open I can watch the "Inactive Memory" slowly climb higher. It starts out when i first boot at about 170 mb - currently at 351 mb and climbing, and all i have running is firefox and Itunes.
At first i thought it was a C1 Pro issue, but it seems that may not be the case.
When i opened the Activity monitor last night the Inactive Memory was at 10 gigabytes. ***?
What is Inactive memory? and why would it keep climbing?
Is this an issue with OSX that anyone has heard?
All software is current.
Hardware Overview:
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 12 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MP51.007F.B03
SMC Version (system): 1.39f11
SMC Version (processor tray): 1.39f11

Eric Eskam wrote:
Sounds like a classic memory leak.
I'm sorry, but you could not be more wrong. As explained above, Inactive memory is in effect a filesystem cache. So OS X is caching files in RAM as they are being written to disk by Capture One Pro - this is so that if they are re-read, they do not need to be re-read from disk which is slower. OS X uses this cache only when it's not needed by other programs.
The inactive memory is increasing here, because Capture One Pro is constantly writing to disk. OS X is then thinking "I have all this RAM that's not being used, how about I keep a copy of what's being written to disk in this spare RAM for speed?" .. make sense?
If Capture One Pro had a memory leak, that would be visible within wired/active memory, and the process itself would grow in size.
In fact, the more inactive memory your machine is consuming, the better.
Free RAM is wasted RAM.

Inactive memory is growing until there is no free memory

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