Memory incorrectly reported in Activity Monitor.

Yesterday I installed an additional 8GB of memory to my 2007 MAC Pro, it had been 8GB total. Under system profiler, it reported the expected 16GB total memory, but in activity monitor only 8GB reported on pie chart. I tried reseting PRAM to no avail. When I installed FCPX earlier this week, my system was brought to it's knees due to page swaps during imports, so tried to double my memory. Any ideas? I have not yet tried to re-import to FCPX as of yet.

Either the dimms are bad, in which case send them back for replacments, or perhaps you didn't install them in the proper slots. If it's a "2006 mac pro" which I guess is the first mac pro here is the dimm layout chart. Check you installation against that:
Here's the kind of dimms you should have:
By the way, to see the total memory the machine thinks it has you might find it easier or more convenient to just click the Apple icon in the upper left and select "About This Mac".

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Compressed memory showing 0% in activity monitor

On one of my Mac Mini's (late 2012), upgraded to 16GB RAM, I keep getting out of memory messages when running apps and on checking the activity monitor it is showing 0% for all running apps under the compressed memory column. I'm running OS-X 10.10.3.
Any ideas on what's going on here? I've tried resetting the NVRAM....

The system isn't compressing memory because is doesn't yet need to; 16GB is pretty generous. The 'Memory' column includes shared memory (system libraries) so there can be a lot of 'double counting' in the figures. You can control+click on the 'Memory' column headers to get other measures.
Try opening Safari and open a dozen tabs with different complicated pages in each one of them, e.g. some pages news.bbc.co.uk. I'm sure you'll be able to start compression eventually.
Meanwhile, your original issue is a bug, or corrupted file, associated with Solibri Model Viewer. You'll probably need to contact its developer for assistance as I doubt that enough users will be reading this forum for you to get an answer here.
C.

Checking Memory Usage via the Activity Monitor

In trying to find out why iPhoto is so slow, it was suggested that I check the activity monitor to see what applications are using the most memory. Here is what I saw (see below). Does anyone know what kernel_task is? It is using up the most memorr and I have no idea what it is. I would have asked this of the very generous person who has been helping me but I could not reply to his last post....thanks for any information.

Uninstall it. You don't need it.
Be sure to uninstall it properly - there will likely be files littered around the various LaunchAgent, LaunchDaemon folders.

Activity Monitor Dock Icon - Memory - Missing

Why is the Memory option for the Activity Monitor Dock Icon missing now in Mavericks?
Why would Apple remove this feature?
I was happily using this little pie chart for a Dock Icon to keep track of overall memory usage on my system.
Has anyone else found a solution to bring this back?

Yes, thanks for the confirmation. I did some googling and found more people with eight-cores who could not view more than one bar in the dock icon.
I understand that showing eight bars in the icon might've been unreadable, but I would have preferred that they show two bars for the dual processors, instead of leaving us with one bar. I'll have to look into some alternate utilities, but it's a shame Apple decided to regress functionality on their top-end machines.

Incorrect app name in Activity Monitor

Has anyone else ever noticed an application's name misspelled or incorrect in the Activity Monitor list? E.g.: Illustrator is spelled without the 'r' as 'Illustrato'. Other apps are spelled correctly, including longer names. I have never seen this on other machines with Illustrator or any other app's name.

You may have to inspect the computer's desktop and other file/folders once you
change settings to allow +invisible items+ to appear, where you may see them all.
The system uses invisible files, and sometimes a user accessible file may go
invisible. While I have not done it, some of my utilities (OnyX) can make them
appear; this usually requires an admin password to alter system settings.
If a file name accidentally gets a . (period) in front of it, the file may change and
this may make it invisible, too. And if you change the name of an item whose
icon is on the Dock, the link back there probably won't work anymore.
And if you see a null item in Activity Monitor, you may turn it off or delete it.
Sorry to not be of more help.
Good luck & happy computing!

Activity monitor Page Out question

Is there a way to get Page Outs to report the number of page outs rather than bytes ?
And when did this change, as it used to report in # of pages.... I think in 10.5

Sorry, but that cannot be changed. If you want a better report of that information then open the Terminal and enter: top then press RETURN. Top's information is more complete than what is reported in Activity Monitor. Also see:
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.

Activity monitor file cache

In activity monitor it shows that I have 16GB of physical memory, 12.77 GB used memory, 16GB virtual memory.
It also shows App memory 1.9GB, FILE CACHE 9.56GB and wired memory 1.31GB.
My question is in regards to file cache at 9.56GB. What is file cache and why is it so high? Does this mean I should install more memory? I looked file cache up and I think it's memory that has been used but is not being used currently, it's waiting to be used again. Not sure if that's right though, or what it really means. Thanks for any help.
Late 2013 27" iMac, 3.4 GHz i5
16GB ram
OSX 10.9.4

Thank you, that helps. I'm not super tech savvy, but this is what I took from that article.
The app memory + wired memory + file cache = memory used. So since the memory used includes file cache, I'm not really running out of memory as I thought I was. The file cache is basically RAM on stand by in case it's needed by any app. God, I hope I got that right!
The memory pressure on my activity monitor shows green.

Rainbow wheel when open activity monitor

hello, my laptop has been working fine, up until a month it's a bit slow when opening applications...but now, as i started reading, i can check the processes on the memory by checking the activity monitor...but when i open it, it only shows the beach ball of death...and i have to close it by force quitting it...any ideas? thanks

the.,
If you have hard drive corruption that requires a repair every third day you most likely have some hardware acting up. Bad RAM is the usual cause or your hard drive is failing.
I would try running the extended version of your Apple Hardware Test.
It's not perfect but may flag something.
A more thorough test for RAM is the free Rember.
Use the extended test also.
Here's a nice faq on RAM testing.
I don't use Drive genius. I've owned another utility for years.
The only one I would recommend is DiskWarrior. It is the best at directory repairs. It rebuilds then actually replaces your old directory. I feel every Mac owner should have a copy.
It also has File System repair now and hard drive S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics.
I use DW once a month to try and catch errors in my system from getting too far out of hand. It has repaired every little and big issue I have ever had with my three Macs.
I'm not saying Drive Genius is not up to par...wouldn't know, I just have had such great success with DW that I see no need to use another utility.
DALE

Activity Monitor showing incorrect amount of virtual memory size

Hi,
I noticed that in Activity Monitor that the Virtual Memory size was incorrect.
Does any body else have the same issue?

Ignore that. The method it's calculated works as following:
1. You have the Finder and Safari open.
2. Both programs and no other ones use the content of a single block of data. This block takes up 2MB of RAM or swapfile space.
3. The block is counted as 4MB in the VM size entry because it's being used twice.
Expanding the scenario over many processes and blocks adds up to a VM size figure which is far larger than the actual amount in use or the combined total of RAM and swapfile space.
(48360)

Activity Monitor reports incorrect amount of RAM

I have an early '09 Mac Mini 2.0 Ghz. I bought a 2GB stick from crucial and installed it in the empty slot without a hitch, I was nervous, but ifixit was a great help. If I look at the "About this Mac" screen, it clearly now says 3GB. If I then click look under the system profiler, all is well there also. 1-1GB + 1-2GB for a total of 3. If I open Activity Monitor, under the pie chart where it is supposed to say the total amount of RAM installed on the machine, it says 2.75GB. What gives? This one really has me stumped. Strange thing is that if I add up the "free:" and "used:" from the column on the left, it adds to 3GB.
I check my other Macs, all 4 display the correct amount in activity monitor. 3 of them running Snow Leopard and 1 G4 running Leopard. I called Apple support and the guy I talked to was unsure, but said that I should call Crucial. Called them, and the guy told me he was CERTAIN that the RAM was fine if it was up and running without crashing, which it is. He said it would either not startup, or it would be crashing regularly. I downloaded a RAM testing software, recommended by the crucial guy, called rember. Ran it, and all tests passed.
A few months ago, shortly before installing the RAM, I was given an old G3 iBook. I wanted to put some software on it for my daughter and hooked it up via Target Disk Mode to my Mini. Soon after it was connected, I smelled an electrical fire. The Mini then shut down and the fan spun at max for over an hour, with no response to the power button and the light off. Eventually I unplugged it, then later plugged back in and restarted. It seemed to be working fine. When I tried to hook up a firewire HD, it wouldn't read it. Under system profiler it said "Unable to read Firewire Device" in red (first time I had ever seen color in the profiler!) letters. I took it to the genius bar and the eventually told me the logic board was bad. Week later got it back with a new LB. About a month later Snow Leopard came out and I then added the RAM and installed it. It had previously been running Leopard.
I know that somewhere along the line, there was an update specifically for '09 Mini's that said something to the effect of... to correct an issue with certain Mac Mini's recognizing certain 3rd party RAM. It was a EFI update!?! maybe!?! or some type of ROM update, I think. I installed that update and got the "Successfully installed" dialog box after restart. I am not certain that the "bad" logic board (TDM firewire issue) had anything to do with the RAM, or even if the issue was present before the new logic board.
Would a replacement logic board be the cause? Maybe I had done the ROM update on the Mini's old logic board, but the new one needs to be updated? Does anyone else have these issues with a Mini or even another computer? Or is it a bug in activity monitor?

You have to look at whether the specs state the GPU RAM is shared with main memory or not.
For example, for the latest Mac Minis, the spec states:
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 128MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
or
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
Compare to the high end iMac which simply states:
NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
All current Macs use integrated GPUs that use shared main memory RAM for graphics save for iMacs with an NVIDIA GT or ATI Radeon GPU, MacBook Pros with the NVIDIA 9600M GPU, and Mac Pros.
On shared machines Snow Leopard is just more honest by noting that memory used by the GPU is not actually available for use by the OS.

Memory shown in activity monitor is incorrect

why is the activity monitor showing a descrepancy with the physical memory installed?

Why do you think there is a discrepancy? If you click the apple on the menu bar, and about this mac, how much memory does it say you have? What does the activity monitor say you have (and where are you reading it from)?

Activity Monitor Indicates 16+TB Memory Usage !

Has anyone ever seen an application's memory usage displayed in the Activity Monitor as 'Terabytes?' I recently noticed that Photoshop CS3 was using [get this] '16,777,216.00TB' of Real Memory. I spoke with both Adobe & Apple, and neither has any reports of anything like this. Weird!

Did restart, but haven't had a chance to run PS yet. I did repair permissions via Disk Utility and there were quite a few corrections. Whether that had anything to do with it remains to be seen. I did read once that incorrect permissions [set incorrectly by installers] can cause a host of application-related issues [such as app crashes and the inability to launch them]. Other app memory usage looks normal.

Activity Monitor inaccurate memory

I just added 2x1GB Crucial sticks to my G5 dual 2.5 for a total of 5GB in 10.3.9. But activity monitor now shows incorrect values for free memory. The pie chart shows 1GB of total RAM instead of 5GB. The top command in terminal agrees with Activity Monitor for used RAM, VM, and pageins/outs but does show the correct free RAM as 4.5GB. So this would seem to be a cosmetic issue, but it does make acitivity monitor a lot less useful. Accurate values were reported with 3GB RAM installed before the memory upgrade. Anyone know a fix for this behavior?

Similar issues have been fixed by running the Repair Permissions feature of the Disk Utility. This may also be the result of the address space some applications use to store the amount of RAM installed not being large enough to handle a number over 4GB properly. In either case, the full amount of RAM will be available to the system.
(11910)

Activity monitor memory numbers don't add up

Activity Monitor reports that I have 7.99 GB of memory in use. However, the numbers for individual processes don't add up to nearly that large of a number. What could be causing such a huge disparity between those two? Is there something I'm missing (and yes, I have it set to show all processes)?

For one the File Cache is not included in the process display as the use of the file cache is system wide. It is also not shown in the kernel usage.
At the moment Activity monitor for my system shows the Kernel using 1.019 GB of real memory, the File cache at 2.95 GB.
There may well be other memory allocations that are system wide function and services that are not readily attributable or allocatable to individual processes. If you look at the screen shot above:
Memory Used = App memory + File Cache + Wired memory.
I suspect that App Memory = the sum of the Proceess Real memory column

Activity monitor says I have 1 -3% of System Memory free, yet CPU usage shows less than 10% total of all processes

Activity monitor says I have 1 -3% of System Memory free, yet CPU usage shows less than 10% total of all processes

I think you should review what you wrote. There is no question, hence, my reply. I can't tell by the AM listing what applications are using memory. You need to click on the Real Mem column once or twice to display in descending order.
Aside from what you see in AM, what exactly is your problem or perceived problem. You are very low on Free Mem at the moment the screen shot was taken. Those displays are not depicting your computer's instantaneous memory usage.
About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory & determine how much RAM is used
Memory Management in Mac OS X
Performance Guidelines- Memory Management in Mac OS X
A detailed look at memory usage in OS X
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines- About the Virtual Memory System
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.
Adding RAM only makes it possible to run more programs concurrently. It doesn't speed up the computer nor make games run faster. What it can do is prevent the system from having to use disk-based VM when it runs out of RAM because you are trying to run too many applications concurrently or using applications that are extremely RAM dependent. It will improve the performance of applications that run mostly in RAM or when loading programs.

Memory incorrectly reported in Activity Monitor.

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