MacMost Now 390: Understanding Memory Use with Activity Monitor

You can use Activity Monitor to see how your Mac is using memory. But what do free, active, inactive and wired mean? How about page ins and page outs? Plus, learn to use them to figure out if you need more memory.
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Comments: 12 Comments

    Ken
    16 years ago

    Nice explanation. Thanks Gary.

    Bruce
    16 years ago

    Excellent and very informative.

    Rich O
    16 years ago

    Awesome explanation! much appreciated! thanks.

    Dale A
    16 years ago

    You answer some of the questions I have always wanted to ask!

    Phyllis S.
    16 years ago

    I love MacMost Now. I follow on Twitter and Facebook. Gary keeps me up to date with easy to follow explanations. I'm waiting for his iPad manual!

    Chris
    14 years ago

    Very good, very complete and simple to understand. Particularly liked the look
    at page in/page out which often gets overlooked by explanations of the pie chart.

    macinatic
    14 years ago

    I'd like to monitor the performance of the video memory in my Mac Pro. Does anyone know of a solution for me?
    Thanks!

    Aaren
    14 years ago

    you're so awesome! thanks alot

    Andrew
    14 years ago

    Thanks.

    What about Swap Used:? What does that measure?

      Gary Rosenzweig
      14 years ago

      That's how much memory has been copied to the hard drive -- virtual memory, in other words.

        Andrew
        14 years ago

        Thank you for the quick reply. I just noticed you mention swap used. I must have been up too late.
        This is a great overview for anyone wondering about their RAM and it's capacity sufficiency. :)

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