findermacbook promemory
Activity monitor shows finder using ~24 gb of RAM (screenshot below), when my machine only has 16 gb installed. I figure this has to be a bug because "Memory Used" only shows 9.62 gb, and I'm not experiencing any slowdowns. However, it's a little alarming and if there's an easy fix I'd like to take care of it. I'm using the most up-to-date Apple OS software as of writing (3/22/16). Thanks for your help!
Jack
There is a tool available to check a lot of graphic card parameters: OpenGL Drive Monitors
You may download it at Apple developer. You need a developer account though. Search for "Graphics Tools" and then download "Graphics Tools for Xcode - Xcode 6.1". Open the .dmg and copy "OpenGL Drive Monitors" to your Application folder.
You can't track down graphic memory usage of individual apps though.
Screenshot:
Closing the last window of an application doesn't necessarily close the application.
For example, opening two TextEdit windows and then closing them both (kbd>Cmd-W or click the red close button top-left of window) will not close TextEdit. This allows one to click File>New (or Cmd-N) to open and work on a new TextEdit document.
You may be familiar with how Microsoft Windows manages applications. It actually opens a new instance of Firefox, for example, for each window that you open. On the Mac, that's not necessarily the case.
People who learn to use Microsoft Windows before learning the Mac are often confused at first because the Mac uses a different conceptual model. This is how Macs have always been, more or less.
Mac users get used to typing Cmd-Q if they want to completely quit an application. Often, this is not necessary. But if your machine doesn't have much RAM, you may notice memory hogs like browsers slowing things down.
Best Answer
I would say that this is a bug in the display. If you were to use
top -o memin Terminal.app, you would likely see something like this:As you can see, in this view, no single app is using more than 720M (because we're sorting by RAM usage, we only see the top RAM-hogging processes).
It's also possible that your Activity Monitor display is removing a decimal point, because 2.4G would be slightly more reasonable for Finder to occupy.
Possibly relevant links:
https://superuser.com/questions/669331/osx-mavericks-using-way-too-much-ram
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2784719?tstart=0