Memory fills up quickly

Four of a kind

I'm still getting used to the Mac after a lifetime of thinking windows was the only beast in the woods!

Loving it so far.

One thing I notice however is that my memory always seems to fill up pretty fast - even with 16GB RAM.

I've attached my specs of my machine.

I have 5 gmail accounts open and 3 google spreadsheet docs most of the time - which I know would be intenstive - but on my previous laptop that had more or less the same specs (RAM etc) - I'd never an issue of things stalling.

I get the round beach ball appear every so often which leads me to optimize the RAM via the Memory Diag app.

I'm using Safari.

Is there something I can do to prevent the beach ball appearing? I need those gmail and speadsheet accounts open most of the time for work.

Four of a kind

20 mins after quitting Safari and loading up my docs/emails again - the RAM is full again: See pic.

Greentree_uk

did you migrate from your old mac?

if so it may have brought across some legacy software that is causing this. if you can try a clean install on a separate partition or disk and then test again.

Four of a kind

Greentree_uk wrote: »

did you migrate from your old mac?

if so it may have brought across some legacy software that is causing this. if you can try a clean install on a separate partition or disk and then test again.

It's a brand new mac. I had a pc before this, so nothing was brought over.

Zcott

What about using the built in mail app for gmail instead of the web interface? Might take some load off Safari.

Kavrocks

If you want some help trouble shooting the spinning beach balls you will need to give more targeted information. Some items that would better help are

• What are you doing before the beach ball appears?
• What is running in the background?
• Screenshots from Activity Monitor (CPU and Memory)

Activity Monitor screenshots will give more detail and insight than most of what you have previously posted. It's a great source of information and one I recommend you get used to being able to decipher at a glance, especially if you wish to diagnose and solve your own issues.

I also think it is worth noting that having your RAM fill up quickly and staying near full is a good thing. The RAM usage you posted in your last screenshot is what I would expect. 15GB of 16GB used is a good thing.

Programs in RAM will load and run much quicker than those that have to be loaded from disk (granted its not much of a difference with an SSD). Having loads of free RAM isn't necessarily a good thing, it could be a sign of very inefficient use of resources. OS X has been known to use RAM very efficiently and one of the ways it does that is by filling it to near capacity very quickly and swapping programs in and out of swap space as needed intelligently.

You may not like this but if the spinning beach balls are solely caused by Safari (and I wouldn't be surprised, it has caused a lot of problems in Yosemite) moving back to Chrome or instead moving to Firefox might solve them. One of the design goals with Firefox is a fast and lean browser capable of having several tabs open all at once, it sounds like the best option out of Chrome, Safari and Firefox for your needs. Note: I use Chrome but am thinking of moving to Firefox as I too always have a lot of tabs open, plus its very privacy conscious.

Four of a kind

I moved to Safari from chrome last week due the battery getting completed zapped by chrome working in the background. Like 3 hours on battery was all I was getting.

I've attached a few activity monitor screenshots - which hopefully might help a little more?

Thanks.

Four of a kind

This is another activity screenshot from the top.

Kavrocks

Four of a kind wrote: »

I moved to Safari from chrome last week due the battery getting completed zapped by chrome working in the background. Like 3 hours on battery was all I was getting.

I've attached a few activity monitor screenshots - which hopefully might help a little more?

Thanks.

I know you moved. Hence why I said 'You may not like this...'

None of the screenshots you posted show any major issues. You should Force quit softwareupdate as it is Not responding though.

The screenshots arent much use unless they occur very close to a spinning beach ball or during it. You should also look at the Memory tab of Activity Monitor and not just CPU.

Four of a kind

Thanks for the info mate. Yeah, I've added the screenshot of the memory tab. It looks like the google tabs (gmail and spreadsheets) are eating up a good chunk?

Honestly, the beachball only appears in google spreadsheets from time to time (if it occurs). It makes sense though for the RAM to be used up to it's max.

Is there any need for me to keep emptying it from the memory diag app?

Kavrocks

Four of a kind wrote: »

Thanks for the info mate. Yeah, I've added the screenshot of the memory tab. It looks like the google tabs (gmail and spreadsheets) are eating up a good chunk?

Yes, exactly. Nothing that would worry me overly though.

Four of a kind wrote: »

Honestly, the beachball only appears in google spreadsheets from time to time (if it occurs). It makes sense though for the RAM to be used up to it's max.

If it's that big of a deal try Firefox.

Four of a kind wrote: »

Is there any need for me to keep emptying it from the memory diag app?

That's doing more harm than good in my opinion. OS X like most (good) operating systems is very good at managing its RAM usage.

thecommander

Step 1. Stop using the Memory Diag app.
Step 2. Don't worry about memory usage, it manages itself.