Understanding memory usage on your Mac

#589 | 2:39 |

Tutorials

Wednesday February 24, 2010

If you run

Activity Monitor on your Mac

and take a look at

memory usage

you might be confused. You'll see terms like "wired," "inactive," and so on. What do these mean? Michael "Doctor File Finder" Callahan explains memory usage terms on the Mac.

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Show Notes

- Click on Finder and then click on Applications.

- Under Applications, find the Utilities folder and double-click on it.

- In the Utilities folder, find Activity Monitor and click on it.

- At the bottom, you'll see the breakdown of memory usage.

- Free represents the actual free memory that is available for use by any program.

- Wired memory is reserved and used by the operating system.

-

Active memory

is the total amount of memory that's currently being used by running programs.

- Inactive memory is memory that has been recently used by programs that are now closed.

- Your Mac keeps this inactive memory available for a period of time in case you should reopen one of the programs that this inactive memory was used by previously.

- Used memory is the total of Free, Wired, Active, and Inactive memory.

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