Is anyone else having a RAM issue? Anyone know if i can re-install mountain lion?

Question

After istalling Mountain Lion, i noticed things take a bit longer to carry out for example i noticed a lot more lag (not a whole lot) but I never had this probelm with Lion when powering up and having the toolbar and dock show up, which takes around a minute or two to appear. I also have 2 doc's open, my mail, and 1 safari window and 3 tabs, and with this, the amount of inactive memory keeps on growing. When i first updated, i opened safari 6 (just one page with no tabs) and noticed how my inactive memory jumped from a few mb to around 4gb and as long as i keep using any application, i keep having to use FreeMemory to free things up. At this point it is getting frustrating and a resart didn't help. My amount of inacitve memory just stays around 1gb which never happened before with Lion, which would keep freed memory free and the longer i carry out normal task, the less memory i have available to the point where i get down to just a few mb if i have tabs that have heavy flash sites on them. By the way i have a fall 2011 macbook pro, 2.2ghz i7 with 8gb of ram

Answer 1

ML manages memory very differently to earlier OS versions.  I thought it was sluggish at first but today it seems faster than Lion.  While most memory on my 3GB iMac is used the key statistic is pageouts of which I have had only 1.8 MB after a full days work (mail, web rowsing, gimp, merlin project management software, and pages all being used).  If you have a large page out figure it might be worth investing in more ram, otherwise don't worry about it.  A lot of free memory looks great, but if it isn't being used it might as well be still on the shelf at the store where you bought it.  Emptying out the inactive memory would only be counter productive as that information would have to be reloaded from your HD if you restart the application it belongs to.