Mac OS X: What is using my 'active' memory?
- by badkitteh
Hello fellas,
I'm using a recent MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM and after a few hours of using it at work I notice the amount of 'active' memory growing and growing.
Whenever I reboot my Mac, everything looks fine and it is hardly using any RAM. But after a few hours it looks like this:
As you can see, in this case it's about 4.3 GB.
Being a developer, I know that 'active memory' is the amount of memory that is currently used by running processes. So the first thing I did was quitting all applications and killing all processes that don't seem to belong to Mac OS X.
After I did that, my active memory came down about 400 MB, but got stuck at what you see in the screenshot. There are no more processes or applications to quit.
Now I'm wondering what is actually holding on to the memory? top and Activity Monitor don't report any processes with a high memory usage.
Any ideas?
Thanks!