macbook promacosmemory
My computer's been really slow, to the point where it's almost unusable, and according to Activity Monitor, it's because the physical memory's basically all being used (the CPU usage is fine). However, the processes' memory don't all add up to the total memory usage reported by Activity Monitor (I did show all processes, not just the user's). Where is the extra memory usage coming from?
The first thing you might want to do is restart it. That will probably fix the problems.
Other things you might want to check:
Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.App) and execute:
ls -lh /var/vm
The output will consist of one (or more) swapfile0, 1, 2… and next to them you’ll see the size. Small sizes are ok (a few hundred Megabytes). If that swapfile is huge, then you have an Insufficient RAM problem. You need more RAM or less programs at the same time.
Here’s my output: (I have 12 GB of RAM, so that’s a lot to spare)
In the end, restart your computer and monitor those values throughout the day(s).
Most of the difference was marked probably memory marked as inactive. Any app can still use this memory, so it's not marked as used by some process.
For more info about inactive memory, see this thread.
Wired memory usually makes up a much smaller portion. This is memory used by the OS; it isn't available to your apps.
For more info, see the Apple article Reading System Memory Usage in Activity Monitor.
Best Answer
The overall picture of your RAM is that it's healthy and there is no memory pressure. Something else is the bottleneck causing slowness.
Onle 2 GB of RAM is used for App Memory and less than a gig of File Cache and Wired Memory seems fine. Some IO would be faster if you had more File Cache, so you could try quitting Apps you don't need, but I'd focus on the CPU and Disk/Network tabs of Activity Monitor and start benchmarking the things that are slow.
What are you waiting for? Switching an app that's running? Starting a new app? Viewing web pages? Something else?