What is using my memory?

hi
I have a Mac Mini with 8 gb of Ram running Yosemite, and I have the app Memory Clean running on my task bar, which I use to periodically free up memory. However, most times it shows that I have between 2 and 3 gb of Ram free, and I'm not sure why it's so low. Most of the time I only have Mail and Safari open, and occasionally only Safari.
Any ideas why the available memory is so low relative to what I have installed? Seems like 5-6 gb of memory are being taken up somewhere.
What would be a reasonable amount of RAM that should be available?
thanks
nick

Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor -> Memory
As greg sahli says, Mac OS X is attempting to maximum RAM usage so that it can avoid expensive (in power and time) access to your disk storage.  The less it has to access storage the longer a laptop battery will last, and the faster Mac OS X will run.  Granted a Mac mini does not have a battery to worry about, but the cache will speed up Mac OS X.
Every time you purge RAM you force the Mac to access storage to get back what it had cached in RAM, thus forcing Mac OS X to get the data back from disk which is orders of magnitude slower than RAM (and using more energy, so you are being less "Green" ).
If you have a performance problem, please describe the issue, under what conditions you see this, what apps are running, and any other details that might help us provide a solution.
NOTE:  I have 16GB of RAM and currently only 520megabytes are unused.  My system is running just fine, and I am happy Mac OS X is not wasting the RAM I paid for.

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