Memory usage needs defining

Can someone please explain the terms that are listed under the Activity Monitor. I have
Free - 169MB - I understand this one
Wired - 1.13GB - ??
Active- 557MB - ??
Inactive-157MB - ??
Used - 1.83GB - I understand this one.
I am running VM Fusion when I took this snapshot and I just ordered more memory to upgrade to 4GB to help my windows sessions.
Thanks and by the way loving this new MBP - going on 2 weeks now and can't put it down.

<font "size=+1">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.

Similar Messages

Normal memory usage?

Hi...
Could anyone tell me what should be the normal memory usage of the server
just after startup?
I only have a few ejbs deployed and just after startup, my server memory
jumps to 150Mb.. so I'm wondering if this is normal because it looks to me
like a lot of memory...
I used to work with another application server with the same ejbs deployed
and even after several days up, the server process never took more han
75-80Mb of memory.. Weblogic is taking like twice this amount just after
startup... maybe my tuning is wrong.. is there anythng that I could do to
lower the memory usage?
by the way. I'm running WLS 7.0 on a win2k machine
thanks!
Mathieu Girard
[email protected]

Hi Mathieu,
Generally there is no hard rule defined for all app servers for
how much memory it should use after startup. Why whould you
need to lower the memory usage? Do you have any specific
problem with the digits you've got?
Regards,
Slava Imeshev
"Mathieu Girard" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]..
Hi...
Could anyone tell me what should be the normal memory usage of the server
just after startup?
I only have a few ejbs deployed and just after startup, my server memory
jumps to 150Mb.. so I'm wondering if this is normal because it looks to me
like a lot of memory...
I used to work with another application server with the same ejbs deployed
and even after several days up, the server process never took more han
75-80Mb of memory.. Weblogic is taking like twice this amount just after
startup... maybe my tuning is wrong.. is there anythng that I could do to
lower the memory usage?
by the way. I'm running WLS 7.0 on a win2k machine
thanks!
Mathieu Girard
[email protected]

VMWare ESX 4.1 - Guest memory usage

Hi,
We are running an ESX Server 4.1 with 36 GB RAM. We have installed 4 VM (Windows Server 2008 R2 and MS SQL Server 2008 R2), each defined with 8 GB RAM (1 ERP 6.0 EHP3 ABAPJAVA, 1 ERP 6.0 EHP4 ABAPJAVA, 1 Enterprise Portal 7.02 and 1 Solution Manager 7.0 EHP1). Each SAP system is up and running, performances are good, but only a few users are working on each of them. I see a warning in Vcenter concerning the RAM usage (94%), but the guest memory usage is low (from 5 to 12% in average during the last month).
How can I optimize ?
Kind regards,
Christophe

Hi Christophe,
first of all, the warning you see is not critical. It is just a standard warning that comes up when a standard theshold of memory usage is reached. The 4 GB RAM you have left on the host should be sufficient to cover the memory allocation overheads of the VMs and the memory that is needed by the ESX hypervisor.
I assume you reserved 100 % of the assigned memory (mandatory for SAP virtualization). Reserved memory cannot be used by other VMs, therefore it is "not assignable" from the perspective of the hypervisor. This could be the reason why the threshold of the warning is reached although the utilization inside the guest ("active" memory) is low.
Kind regards,
Matthias

Some questions about the limit of memory usage of Adobe flash player in different OS & Web Browser

Hi Adobe experts,
I'm from HP, and now using Adobe flash player making some products about massive data displaying.
For my target, I need to show more than 200 K rows in client web browser, using AdvancedDataGrid.
And that may needs more than 200M to cache the data in Web browser memory space.
So, my questions are:
Does there any memory usage limit in flash player?
Say, if we have 4G bytes of physical memory in machine, in Windows, how much can I use in flash player?
Also, if we have 4G bytes of physical memory in Linux, how much can I use in flash player?
Does it depends on the Web Browser?
Say, is there any difference between different web browsers?
If the limit exists, can we control the limit?
Say, can we define some parameters in the tag in web page to expand the limitation?
Or, can we try to control this limitation by the Flash player management which exists in the Windows Control Panel?
Best Regards
Huang Haixu
+86 18616735091
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>

1. Yes. The Toolkit for CreateJS is an extra downloadable extension for Flash CS6. It will publish html and js files that will provide the animation instead of the swf that you would normally publish. The success or failure of the resulting javascript version of your animation is the result of working within the constraints of the toolkit. You are pretty much constrained to using the timeline in Flash for your animations. If you work only in Actionscript, then the output will be very disappointing.
2. Edge outputs javascript, css, and html to give you an animation. The user interface allows you to design within the constraints of what Edge can do. You can preview and adjust and tweek your animation as you work. Edge is an html5 tool. It can create html5 animation. It is not a replacement for Flash. It is something that you can use instead of Flash to embed animation in html.
The problems and benefits of each are unique. Neither is a good substitute to learning javascript, css and html5. If you don't understand the code that is created from each of these tools, you can easily end up with huge, bloated, files that perform poorly. I'm very biased toward actually knowing what is going on. If I need to edit something, I want to be able to go into the code and make a change, not add an additional chunk of code to work around what was there. I don't use the timeline at all, and so nothing that I have will publish using CreateJS. Well, it will publish, but nothing happens because there is nothing on the timeline to translate.
You can download a trial of Flash CS6 and try the Toolkit for yourself. Edge is still in free preview, you can get a copy at http://labs.adobe.com and try it to see how it works.
Also, if you're not using the Greensock Animation Platform with Flash, have a look at that. It has recently been extended to provide Javascript analogues for most of the Libraries. http://www.greensock.com/

XDD causing lot of Memory usage

Hi,
We are using Documaker 12.0 Patch 1 and running RP through IDS 2.2 in real-time mode (windows Platform). Each request coming through IDS and while processing gendata it was using huge amount of memory(around 400 MB). When we tried to find the root cause of the problem, it nailed down to XDD as it was huge in size.
Is there any option in ini or jdt files which can reduc ethe memory usage?
Thanks In Advance
Priya.

Hi,
I could think of one option here. Since you have mentioned that the XDD is huge, I would recommend you to split the XDD into smaller ones. However you will have to see the feasibility based on your system need.
a) Define a primary extract dictionary (XDD) at the BDF level with all the common fields across LOBs
b) Define Extract Dictionary Override field to define a different XDD for each LOBs that has the Field entries for each specific LOB
Basically, you will have multiple XDDs in your library; one master or primary XDD and smaller LOB specific XDD (based on the Key1, Key2). You may refer to these options in the DM Studio guide for more information. By this way, Documaker wouldn't take memory to load the entire XDD into memory.
Thanks.

Problem with Firefox and very heavy memory usage

For several releases now, Firefox has been particularly heavy on memory usage. With its most recent version, with a single browser instance and only one tab, Firefox consumes more memory that any other application running on my Windows PC. The memory footprint grows significantly as I open additional tabs, getting to almost 1GB when there are 7 or 8 tabs open. This is as true with no extensions or pluggins, and with the usual set, (firebug, fire cookie, fireshot, XMarks). Right now, with 2 tabs, the memory is at 217,128K and climbing, CPU is between 0.2 and 1.5%.
I have read dozens of threads providing "helpful" suggestions, and tried any that seem reasonable. But like most others who experience Firebug's memory problems, none address the issue.
Firefox is an excellent tool for web developers, and I rely on it heavily, but have now resorted to using Chrome as the default and only open Firefox when I must, in order to test or debug a page.
Is there no hope of resolving this problem? So far, from responses to other similar threads, the response has been to deny any responsibility and blame extensions and/or pluggins. This is not helpful and not accurate. Will Firefox accept ownership for this problem and try to address it properly, or must we continue to suffer for your failings?

55%, it's still 1.6Gb....there shouldn't be a problem scanning something that it says will take up 300Mb, then actually only takes up 70Mb.
And not wrong, it obviously isn't releasing the memory when other applications need it because it doesn't, I have to close PS before it will release it. Yes, it probably is supposed to release it, but it isn't.
Thank you for your answer (even if it did appear to me to be a bit rude/shouty, perhaps something more polite than "Wrong!" next time) but I'm sitting at my computer, and I can see what is using how much memory and when, you can't.

Problem with scanning and memory usage

I'm running PS CS3 on Vista Home Premium, 1.86Ghz Intel core 2 processor, and 4GB RAM.
I realise Vista only sees 3.3GB of this RAM, and I know Vista uses about 1GB all the time.
Question:
While running PS, and only PS, with no files open, I have 2GB of RAM, why will PS not let me scan a file that it says will take up 300Mb?
200Mb is about the limit that it will let me scan, but even then, the actual end product ends up being less than 100Mb. (around 70mb in most cases)I'm using a Dell AIO A920, latest drivers etc, and PS is set to use all avaliable RAM.
Not only will it not let me scan, once a file I've opened has used up "x" amount of RAM, even if I then close that file, "x" amount of RAM will STILL be unavaliable. This means if I scan something, I have to save it, close PS, then open it again before I can scan anything else.
Surely this isn't normal. Or am I being stupid and missing something obvious?
I've also monitored the memory usage during scanning using task manager and various other things, it hardly goes up at all, then shoots up to 70-80% once the 70ishMb file is loaded. Something is up because if that were true, I'd actually only have 1Gb of RAM, and running Vista would be nearly impossible.
It's not a Vista thing either as I had this problem when I had XP. In fact it was worse then, I could hardly scan anything, had to be very low resolution.
Thanks in advance for any help

55%, it's still 1.6Gb....there shouldn't be a problem scanning something that it says will take up 300Mb, then actually only takes up 70Mb.
And not wrong, it obviously isn't releasing the memory when other applications need it because it doesn't, I have to close PS before it will release it. Yes, it probably is supposed to release it, but it isn't.
Thank you for your answer (even if it did appear to me to be a bit rude/shouty, perhaps something more polite than "Wrong!" next time) but I'm sitting at my computer, and I can see what is using how much memory and when, you can't.

Problem with JTree and memory usage

I have problem with the JTree when memory usage is over the phisical memory( I have 512MB).
I use JTree to display very large data about structure organization of big company. It is working fine until memory usage is over the phisical memory - then some of nodes are not visible.
I hope somebody has an idea about this problem.

55%, it's still 1.6Gb....there shouldn't be a problem scanning something that it says will take up 300Mb, then actually only takes up 70Mb.
And not wrong, it obviously isn't releasing the memory when other applications need it because it doesn't, I have to close PS before it will release it. Yes, it probably is supposed to release it, but it isn't.
Thank you for your answer (even if it did appear to me to be a bit rude/shouty, perhaps something more polite than "Wrong!" next time) but I'm sitting at my computer, and I can see what is using how much memory and when, you can't.

TOP - Pageouts and memory usage.

Looks like I have plenty of memory for what I am doing. But What do the cumulative numbers around pagein's mean?
Processes: 80 total, 7 running, 3 stuck, 70 sleeping... 523 threads 15:20:14
Load Avg: 1.99, 1.53, 1.37 CPU usage: 10.33% user, 9.00% sys, 80.67% idle
SharedLibs: num = 5, resident = 13M code, 0 data, 1468K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 32848, resident = 2116M + 18M private, 877M shared.
PhysMem: 1853M wired, 2116M active, 3466M inactive, 7439M used, 753M free.
VM: 19G + 284M 332461(0) pageins, 47(0) pageouts
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
12256 top 11.1% 0:14.05 1 18 40 684K 820K 1392K 18M
12238 bash 0.0% 0:00.01 1 14 19 276K 184K 916K 18M
12237 login 0.0% 0:00.02 1 17 136 908K 8724K 3164K 32M
12236 Terminal 1.7% 0:01.45 3 99 433 5264K+ 49M+ 21M+ 419M+
12225 SyncServer 0.0% 0:00.15 2 50 290 3512K 41M 12M 88M
11248 WinAppHelp 0.0% 0:00.40 1 51 289 3208K 40M 11M 339M
11027 Skype 0.0% 0:19.47 31 313 865 46M 76M 88M 557M
10315 PrinterPro 0.0% 0:00.83 2 85 476 12M 51M 29M 423M
10313 launchd 0.0% 0:01.25 3 24 25 120K 296K 464K 18M
8626 QuickTime 0.0% 17:21.09 5 187 655 13M 67M 43M 486M
8556 DashboardC 0.0% 0:06.31 4 124 538 16M 58M 38M 436M
8555 DashboardC 0.0% 0:10.95 4 149 545 23M 58M 49M 444M
8534 Livestatio 16.8% 59:00.13 12 198 771 30M- 94M 62M 584M
8220 Mail 0.0% 0:43.91 27 323 968 24M 94M 80M 554M
2806 Python 0.8% 5:20.05 2 33 281 13M- 248K 14M- 36M-
2761 Transmissi 0.9% 2:49.17 21 270 773 20M 90M 56M 506M

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.

MS Minimize and memory usage

Hi,
I noticed that if you minimize your dos window, your memory usage ( as shown in Windows task manager ) drops a lot. E.g. I have Tomcat running ( 15 MB usage ). When I minimize the Tomcat DOS window, the memory usage shows something like 160kB. Any ideas. What is the real usage ?
Regards,
Dieter Janssen

When you minimize the window Java will run a garbage collection. But also be aware of that the memory usage in Windows task manager is shown in both the Mem Usage column and the VM Size column (you maybe need to add this to your Task manager).
I hope this will help you!
/Michael

Memory Usage And Hard Drive Activity Increase After Latest Upgrade

I have upgraded to Firefox 3.6.15 and latest Adobe Flash Player. Then i noticed that plugin-container started to take a lot of memory as much as Firefox itself totaling around 600Mb. Then i see hard drive activity intermittently slowing down my laptop and making it unresponsive for a short period of time. I have 50 tabs open. I have disabled Flash and since then plugin-container takes very little memory and i don't see consistent hard drive activity.
I need Flash and i don't want to disable it. Is there a solution to this?

I am seeking solutions for same problem. When playing simple online games such as solitaire my memory usage for the plug in container is 300-600 mb while FireFox may only be 80-120 (with several windows or tabs open of mostly text pages). If I disable Adobe add-ons memory usage is greatly reduced. If I understood correctly it is possible to disable the plugin container and run adobe via the old method and another user thought that would solve the problem. I do not understand how it would make a difference but if you havent found a solution you may want to try it. See these 2 threads in the Mozilla forum:
A question and brief explanation and how to disable plugin container in config
I've previously had problems with Adobe crashing Firefox . At least now with Adobe being in the plugin container Firefox does not crash along with it.
I have another issue - I can sometimes still hear the music from a game after I have exited the game and closed the window. I would like to know how to release the resources used by Adobe - kind of like FireFox's RamBack.
Well, good luck to you (and me!)

Having a problem with Excessive "modified" memory usage in Win7 x64, upwards of 3.6GB, any suggestions?

I have 6GB of ram, a fresh install of Windows 7 x64, and the screenshot shows what happens after leaving my PC on for a couple days. (3782+MB being used by modified memory ATM).
http://wow.deconstruct.me/images/ExcessiveMemory.jpg
Any ideas on this?
Edit:
Added this after first round of suggestions
http://wow.deconstruct.me/images/NotSoExcessiveMemory.jpg
This is uptime of around 2 hours.
The first image is of uptime of around 3-5 days.

Matthew,
The only reason why these pages are kept on the modified list indefinitely is because the system doesn't have any available pagefile space left. If you increase the size of the pagefile the system will write most of these pages to disk and then move them from the modified list to the standby list. Standby pages are considered part of "available memory", because they can be reused for some other purpose if necessary.
Whether this would "fix" the problem or not depends on what the actual problem is. If it's an unbound memory leak then increasing the size of the pagefile will simply allow the system to run longer before it eventually hits the maximum pagefile size limit, or runs out of disk space. On the other hand, if it's a case of some application allocating a lot of memory and not using it for a long time, then increasing the pagefile might be a perfectly valid solution.
Allowing the system to manage the size of the pagefile actually works well in most cases. Pagefile fragmentation (at the filesystem level) can only occur when the initially chosen size is not large enough and the system has to extend it at run time. For win7 we have telemetry data that shows that even for systems with 1 GB of RAM, less than 0.1% of all boot sessions end up having to extend the pagefile, and this number is even lower for larger amounts of RAM. If you think you are in that 0.1% and your pagefile might be getting fragmented, you can manually increase its minimum size such that the total system commit charge stays below 80% even if you run all your apps at once (80% is the threshold at which the pagefile is automatically extended). This will make sure the pagefile is created once and then stays at the same size forever, so it can't fragment. The maximum size can either be set to the same value as the minimum, or you can make it larger so that the system is more resilient to memory leaks or unexpectedly high loads.
By the way, Windows doesn't use pagefiles as "extra memory", it uses them as a backing store for private pages, just like regular files are used as a backing store for EXEs/DLLs and memory mapped files. So if the system really has more than enough RAM (like in your second screenshot, where you have 3.6 GB of free pages) you shouldn't see any reads from the pagefile. You can verify this by going to the Disk tab in the resource monitor and looking for any disk IO from pagefile.sys. On smaller systems that don't have an excess of free pages you may see periodic reads from the pagefile, and this is expected because the total amount of data referenced by the OS/drivers/processes is larger than the total RAM. Forcefully keeping all pagefile-backed pages in memory (which is what disabling the pagefile does) would simply mean some other pages (memory mapped files, DLL code or data etc) would have to be paged out.
Regarding further troubleshooting steps: If the system runs fine with a larger pagefile (commit charge stabilizes well below 80%, and you no longer see gigabytes of modified pages accumulating in memory) then you don't really need to do anything. If the problem persists, you can check for any processes with an abnormally high commit charge, and also check kernel memory usage in task manager. If it's a kernel leak you can usually narrow it down to a particular driver using poolmon.exe or kernel debugger.

Very high memory usage..possible memory leak? Solaris 10 8/07 x64

Hi,
I noticed yesterday that my machine was becoming increasingly slow, where once it was pretty snappy. It's a Compaq SR5250NX with 1GB of RAM. Upon checking vmstat, I noticed that the "Free" column was ~191MB. Now, the only applications I had open were FireFox 2.0.11, GAIM, and StarOffice. I closed all of them, and the number reported in the "Free" column became approximately 195MB. "Pagefile" was about 5.5x that size. There were no other applications running and it's a single user machine, so I was the only one logged in. System uptime: 9 days.
I logged out, logged back in, to see if that had an affect. It did not. Rebooted and obviously, that fixed it. Now with only FireFox, GAIM, and a terminal open, vmstat reports "Free" as ~450MB. I've noticed if I run vmstat every few seconds, the "Free" total keeps going down. Example:
unknown% vmstat
kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
r b w   swap free re mf pi po fr de sr cd s0 s1 s2   in   sy   cs us sy id
0 0 0 870888 450220 9 27 10 0 1 0 8 2 -0 -0 -0 595 1193 569 72 1 28
unknown% vmstat
kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
r b w   swap free re mf pi po fr de sr cd s0 s1 s2   in   sy   cs us sy id
0 0 0 870880 450204 9 27 10 0 1 0 8 2 -0 -0 -0 596 1193 569 72 1 28
unknown% vmstat
kthr      memory            page            disk          faults      cpu
r b w   swap free re mf pi po fr de sr cd s0 s1 s2   in   sy   cs us sy id
0 0 0 870828 450092 9 27 10 0 1 0 8 2 -0 -0 -0 596 1193 570 71 1 28
unknown%Output of prstat -u Kendall (my username ) is as follows:
   PID USERNAME SIZE   RSS STATE PRI NICE      TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
2026 Kendall   124M   70M sleep   59    0   0:01:47 1.4% firefox-bin/7
1093 Kendall    85M   77M sleep   59    0   0:07:15 1.1% Xsun/1
1802 Kendall    60M   15M sleep   59    0   0:00:08 0.1% gnome-terminal/2
1301 Kendall    93M   23M sleep   49    0   0:00:30 0.1% java/14
1259 Kendall    53M   15M sleep   49    0   0:00:32 0.1% gaim/1
2133 Kendall 3312K 2740K cpu1    59    0   0:00:00 0.0% prstat/1
1276 Kendall    51M   12M sleep   59    0   0:00:11 0.0% gnome-netstatus/1
1247 Kendall    46M   10M sleep   59    0   0:00:06 0.0% metacity/1
1274 Kendall    51M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:05 0.0% wnck-applet/1
1249 Kendall    56M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:07 0.0% gnome-panel/1
1278 Kendall    48M 9240K sleep   59    0   0:00:05 0.0% mixer_applet2/1
1245 Kendall 9092K 3844K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-smproxy/1
1227 Kendall 8244K 4444K sleep   59    0   0:00:01 0.0% xscreensaver/1
1201 Kendall 4252K 1664K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% sdt_shell/1
1217 Kendall    55M   16M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-session/1
   779 Kendall    47M 2208K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-volcheck/1
   746 Kendall 5660K 3660K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% bonobo-activati/1
1270 Kendall    49M   10M sleep   49    0   0:00:00 0.0% clock-applet/1
1280 Kendall    47M 8904K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% notification-ar/1
1199 Kendall 2928K 884K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% dsdm/1
1262 Kendall    47M 2268K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% gnome-volcheck/1
Total: 37 processes, 62 lwps, load averages: 0.11, 0.98, 1.63System uptime is 9 hours, 48 minutes. I'm just wondering why the memory usage seems so high to do...nothing. It's obviously a real problem as the machine turned very slow when vmstat was showing 195MB free.
Any tips, tricks, advice, on which way to go with this?
Thanks!

Apologies for the delayed reply. School has been keeping me nice and busy.
Anyway, here is the output of prstat -Z:
   PID USERNAME SIZE   RSS STATE PRI NICE      TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
2040 Kendall      144M   76M sleep   59    0   0:04:26 2.0% firefox-bin/10
28809 Kendall     201M 193M sleep   59    0   0:42:30 1.9% Xsun/1
2083 Kendall      186M   89M sleep   49    0   0:02:31 1.2% java/58
2260 Kendall       59M   14M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 1.0% gnome-terminal/2
2050 Kendall       63M   21M sleep   49    0   0:01:35 0.6% realplay.bin/4
2265 Kendall     3344K 2780K cpu1    59    0   0:00:00 0.2% prstat/1
29513 Kendall     71M   33M sleep   39    0   0:07:25 0.2% gaim/1
28967 Kendall     56M   18M sleep   59    0   0:00:24 0.1% gnome-panel/1
29060 Kendall     93M   24M sleep   49    0   0:02:58 0.1% java/14
28994 Kendall     51M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:23 0.1% wnck-applet/1
28965 Kendall     49M   14M sleep   59    0   0:00:33 0.0% metacity/1
   649 noaccess   164M   46M sleep   59    0   0:09:54 0.0% java/23
28996 Kendall     51M   12M sleep   59    0   0:00:50 0.0% gnome-netstatus/1
2264 Kendall    1352K 972K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.0% csh/1
28963 Kendall 9100K 3792K sleep   59    0   0:00:03 0.0% gnome-smproxy/1
ZONEID    NPROC SWAP   RSS MEMORY      TIME CPU ZONE
     0           80          655M 738M    73%       1:18:40 7.7% global
Total: 80 processes, 322 lwps, load averages: 0.27, 0.27, 0.22Sorry about the bad formatting, it's copied from the terminal.
In any event, we can see that FireFox is sucking up 145MB (??!?!!? crazy...) XSun, 200MB, and java 190MB. I'm running Java Desktop System (Release 3) so I assume that is what accounts for the the high memory usage RE: java process. But, XSun, 200MB?
Is this normal and I just need to toss another gig in, or what?
Thanks

Memory problems: computer freezes on heavy memory usage

Ever since I changed the internal hard drive of my MacBook Pro (I installed a Seagate Barracuda 1Tb disk), I have the following problem:
Whenever an application needs a lot of memory (for example Parallels installing a new Windows system, or Acrobat Pro optimizing a big PDF file), the computer progressively freezes. What I mean by freezing is that I can still move the mouse cursor, but clicking has no effect, and there is no interaction whatsoever with the GUI. Even the clock on the menu bar stops.
I never had the problem before. I guess that under normal conditions the Finder will always keep a few Mb of RAM for its own use. After all I have 4Gb of RAM installed.
Is there some way I can prevent the computer from freezing? Has this something to do with VM? Ever since I changed the hard disk, this problem happens once or twice every day, and the only solution is to force a restart, losing all my work…
Thanks in advance for any advice…

First, do not assign more than half your available RAM to a VM. It's best to let the VM software's configuration to select the amount used by its defaults.
Second, watch how many concurrent applications you attempt to use. Monitor your memory usage in Activity Monitor. If the Available RAM (Inactive RAM plus Free RAM) is low and Free RAM is near zero, then you have too many concurrent applications running. This forces the system to start using the disk-based virtual memory file. With too many apps swapping into the vm file disk thrashing will occur that ultimately can lead to the computer appearing to freeze up or to actually freeze up.
Of course your alternative is to install more RAM if in fact you are over-taxing what you have now. You may find the following helpful reading:
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.

Massive memory usage when using latest version of final cut, 10 minutes after restart.

Hey I am really struggling with using Final Cut Pro X and I suspect there is some software issue.
I am editing a one minute video clip, the video files are 1080 h264. I restart my computer and only open final cut. After 10 minutes of editing I cant barely navigate my computer anymore as it is going so slow, until eventually I have to force reboot my computer. I can scarcly export anything out of final cut, when I do my computer feels like its about to die and if it exports I seem to get broken frames and/or missing media.
I reinstalled my mac only about 2 months ago.
System specs.
Mac book pro.
13-inch, Late 2011
Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB
On my previous mac book pro (early 2010, 4 gm ram), running snow leopard and previous versions of final cut I was able to edit 3, 1 hour documentaries with very little problem, but now I cant even manage a one minute clip.
Not sure what to do. Here is a screen shot of my memory usage. Im getting massive swap memory and lots of inactive memory. It seems very strange. Especially after only 10 minutes running only final cut.

FCP is only using 409 MBs of memory out of your 4 GBs. But whatever else you have open is using up virtually all the physical RAM you have. This is forcing the memory manager to page memory out to the disk-based VM file. That's a major reason for major slowdowns.
You have 4 GBs of RAM. How many applications are you running concurrently? If you look at Page outs: you will note the positive number in parentheses. That means your computer is hitting the hard drive a lot because the memory demands are too high. If possible cut down on how many concurrent applications you run or put more RAM into the computer, if that's possible.
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
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 usage needs defining

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