My Macbook pro Mid 2012 Model Seems to be using too much RAM

Question

     Hello everybody, I recenlty bought a Macbook pro Mid 2012 Model and I absolutely fell in love with it! I use it everyday for school, work, and for my musical hobby.
     I haven't had a single problem with it until recently, and it seems like the RAM memory is being all used up without me even running programs. This problem barely started rougly 2-3 weeks ago and it's becoming annoying. I do plan to upgrade the ram soon seeing as the extra RAM will help run my engineering software I'm going to be using.
Anywho I'm just looking for tips, suggestions or answers as to why this problem is occuring. Also heard from a fellow employee that Google Chrome can cause this problem with RAM and battery life as well.

Answer 1

Stop using Chrome for any number of reasons and stick to Safari. An aspect of OS X memory management is to take over as much memory as possible in order to better manage the memory, however, this does not mean you are running out of memory. You only run out of memory when you try to run too many applications concurrently given the amount of RAM you have. You will know when that happens because the computer will slow down, you will see the beachball a lot, everything you do takes forever, and the hard drive will be grinding away.
About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory & determine how much RAM is used
OS X Mavericks- About Activity Monitor
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.