Where'd all the memory go?

[kbw]

I rebooted my workstation this morning and just happened to notice the momory footprint, 3.43Gb in use. Yes, 3.43Gb!

So I had a quick look, it's just running Firefox (with about 10 static pages open in 2 windows and BBC iPlayer plugin) and Activity Monitor. The box is a PPC Apple G5 (10.5.x) with 8G of RAM.

3.43G to run a browser? I just can't get past it.

[chrisname]

Firefox is pretty bad in the way of memory leaks, it's probably that. You can pretty much confirm it if the memory usage increases without you doing anything.

[Gaminic]

Even then... 3.43Gb? I don't know what Apple computers do, but my Windows will warn me when a browser takes up >200MB, which doesn't happen often (just when playing big flash games). I run Chrome for personal use, often with over 20 tabs open (bandwidth limit = don't close youtube).

I'm no longer a Firefox fan (for personal, content-heavy use) as it turns slow pretty quickly. However, I've never seen anything near a Gb. Either one of your plugins/addons/addins is having a field day, or something else is going on. I'd definitely consider reinstalling Firefox. Better yet, get a browser that doesn't get worse with every update.

[1yR4jE8b]

Are you looking at your "in use" memory, or are you also including the cache? I have 16gB of ram in my workstation, and 0mB of free memory, but 13gB of it is just cache.

[kbw]

Are you looking at your "in use"

That's a good question. 189M was marked inactive, the lion's share is marked active.

I take it active means it's in use.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/arch-handbook/vm.html

[helios]

I believe "active" just means "ready to be allocated", while "free" means "being pointlessly wasted on nothing".