I noticed that if I use Mac OS X for a while, I get really low on memory and things start to get slow. I have been suspecting that something was not quite right, because in “Activity Monitor” I would look at the memory usage and it didn’t seem like I was using that much memory.
I added up all the memory from all processes shown in “Activity Monitor.” It adds up to only 1769.2 MB, even though I’m supposed to have 4GB memory. I only have 100MB of memory free. Why is that? It’s showing 625MB as wired, 1.63GB as active, and 1.65 GB as inactive. It says that 3.90 GB are being used.
purge
(flushes disk cache or inactive memory) orsudo periodic weekly
(removes memory-mapped scratch files) instead of iFreeMem, and report back if either of them helped. – Lri Apr 14 '11 at 17:14