# Activity Monitor: Memory Used



## PE_Mac (Oct 18, 2010)

Until yesterday, my Mac had 4GB of RAM. It was forever getting the spinning beach ball. Yesterday, I added another 8GB of RAM. I'm not sure that I understand the Activity Monitor, but it is now showing the follow information:

Physical Memory: 12.00 GB
Memory Used: 8.67 GB
Virtual Memory: 12.00 GB
Swap Used: 0 bytes
App Memory: 2.08 GB
File Cache: 5.43 GB
Wired Memory: 1.18 GB
Compressed: 0 bytes

If I'm reading this right, it seems like 8.67 GB Memory Used is extremely high when the only programs open are Activity Monitor and Google Chrome. 

Things running in the background are as follows:
Google Drive
Dropbox
Avast
Evernote

Can someone tell me if I'm reading this wrong or if not, can I do anything to make the Memory usage be more efficient?

Thanks
Peg


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## PE_Mac (Oct 18, 2010)

I'm now thinking I must be reading it wrong. I also have a program called Magican. It says only 4.7GB of RAM are being used. Still wondering how it ran at all on only 4GB of RAM.


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## badness (Aug 20, 2004)

What operating system are you using? You might want to run the disk utility and repair the hard drive to see if that helps. Chrome can take a fair amount of memory at times, but this sounds like a lot. http://www.cnet.com/how-to/repair-disk-permissions-to-speed-up-your-mac/


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## TheShooter93 (Jul 10, 2008)

That is an extremely high amount of RAM being used. If you had Windows, I'd say you have malware on your system.

Activity Monitor should tell you what processes are taking up the most RAM usage - what is listed there?


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## Headrush (Feb 9, 2005)

It's normal and OS X is actively using the memory for most efficient use in the system.
You can see that the majority is used by OS X for caching files previously opened.

A full explanation here: http://www.switchingtomac.com/tutorials/osx/understanding-memory-pressure-in-os-x-mavericks/

P.S. You want the OS to use as much of the memory as it can. It makes things much faster as it's much faster than HD access.


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