[Re-sending without screenshot, since the attachment may have tripped some AV/spam filter...]
I have an old (late 2008 unibody 15") MacBook Pro that has the maximum[1] 4GB of RAM installed. It is running 10.6.8. Some time ago the machine started occasionally slowing to a crawl during normal use. Looking at Activity Monitor, the culprit invariably seems to be Firefox—when I open a saved session with ~40-50 tabs, it starts out at ~700MB of real memory used, but after a short while this number eventually grows to something ridiculous like 1.4GB. The hard drive has 35-40GB free, so I'd think swap space should not be an issue. I'm working on clearing out those tabs now. But setting aside any questions about FF memory leaks, I'm puzzled by what Activity Monitor's "System Memory" section shows when such slowdowns occur. The Free: line typically shows <100MB (sometimes <10MB !), while at the same time the Inactive: line is usually >1GB. Furthermore, this sometimes happens right when I start FF, well before its memory usage balloons to the large numbers mentioned above. See attached screenshot. [EDIT: removed Activity Monitor screenshot to avoid spam filter. AM was showing FF at CPU=0.5%, Real Mem=721MB, Virtual Mem=618MB; and, under System Memory at the bottom, Free=54MB, Wired=600MB, Active=2.26GB, Inactive=1.10GB, Used=3.95GB.] Does anyone know why I would be seeing such a large number for Inactive memory? It seems a waste to have it sitting there if my system is suffocating for whatever reason. I've run the usual memory diagnostics (Apple Hardware Test, TechTool Pro, etc.) and the memory checks out fine. I would appreciate any info or suggestions. Thanks in advance, -H [1] According to the original specs. I recently learned that the 2009 EFI Firmware Update (which I do have installed) enables a full 8GB to be addressed, and I've ordered a 2x4GB kit to test this out. But for now what I have is the stock 2x2GB. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
