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Who's using all my memory?
First question is, does the computer have enough memory for what it's doing? If there's enough memory for everyone, there's no need to worry, but if the computer is low on memory, sort the process list by 'Real memory' to see who's using the most. Often quitting an application and restarting it will make it use less memory. (Firefox and OpenOffice are particularly good examples of this)
The pie chart shows how the memory in the machine is being used. In this picture, it looks like I don't have a lot of memory "free" (that tiny little green slice), but that's not something to worry about.
The important slice to look at is the blue "Inactive" slice. Ideally, you want the blue and green (inactive & free) to be as large a fraction as possible of your memory. At least a quarter, as a rough rule of thumb.
In this image, VirtualBox is hogging up most of my memory (but that's okay -- I'm running Linux in there) but despite that I still have ~700Mb of inactive memory -- this means that all the processes that NEED active memory already have enough. So my machine is still really snappy.
Who's using all my memory?
First question is, does the computer have enough memory for what it's doing? If there's enough memory for everyone, there's no need to worry, but if the computer is low on memory, sort the process list by 'Real memory' to see who's using the most. Often quitting an application and restarting it will make it use less memory. (Firefox and OpenOffice are particularly good examples of this)
The pie chart shows how the memory in the machine is being used. In this picture, it looks like I don't have a lot of memory "free" (that tiny little green slice), but that's not something to worry about.
The important slice to look at is the blue "Inactive" slice. Ideally, you want the blue and green (inactive & free) to be as large a fraction as possible of your memory. At least a quarter, as a rough rule of thumb.
In this image, VirtualBox is hogging up most of my memory (but that's okay -- I'm running Linux in there) but despite that I still have ~700Mb of inactive memory -- this means that all the processes that NEED active memory already have enough. So my machine is still really snappy.