ML Ram, VRAM paging and allocation questions.

Question

Question 1: I have been dealing with ram issues since I got my 2012 13 MacBook air since I put mountain lion on it. I benched the machine for awhile because of it and used my 2011 MBP since it has 16gb of ram but it recently gave up the ghost so im back on the air. I did all the updates it needed since being benched and for my light duty work it’s always good but as soon as I have more then 2 or 3 apps open at the same time or 6 or 7 safari tab it really goes to crap. After a cold boot with nothing running the OS is using 1.4-1.6gb ram to idle the older MBP used 1gb or less after a cold boot. I have gone to the trouble of doing a complete reinstall and not using any extra apps other then iLife and iWork and that hasn’t helped. The wired ram sits right at a gig and the active ram right around 4-5 hundred mb. I have added up all the running processes and factored in a 10% increase over that number just in case and added in the video ram(which with 4gb of system ram I thought was supposed to be 384mb but its actually 512mb, which is another topics ill be asking about) at 512mb the totally ram usage is only 918mb. I asked this once before and didn’t get any help so ill ask again, is this ram usage normal for this kind of machine or is there something wrong? The apple store says there isn’t anything wrong but there has to either be something wrong or the OS has hidden processes that cant be seen in activity monitor?
Question 2: did one of the updates increase the video ram allocation and is the video ram automatically and always paged or does the OS and graphics processor (HD4k) page VRAM only as needed?
If the graphics processor doenst always page all the video ram and does it dynamically then I have an even bigger problem and more ram being used and not accounted for.

Answer 1

Your issue almost certainly has nothing to do with RAM. Right now I am running Photoshop, FileMaker Pro, Word, iTunes, Mail, I have 8 tabs open in Safari, and about little utilities running. It is a 2011 MBA with 4GB of RAM and it feels no slower now than it did when I rebooted it yesterday after installing an update.
Obsessing over the Activity Monitor's report of RAM usage will get you nowhere - there's only one number in the entire dialog box that has any real importance to us: Page Outs - which indicate how much data has had to be swapped from RAM to hard drive, which, of course means you are trying to use more RAM than the computer actually has.
I suggest that you take a close look at what processes are running and the CPU usage of each. You may have a rogue process that is bogging the computer down. Another two prime suspects would be Internet plug-ins and Safari extensions.
One of my most important troubleshooting tools is a test account in which I've installed no software or performed any configurations. When my computer acts up I boot into that account to see if the problem follows me there. If it does not, I know the problem exists in my library.