[X-Unix] Memory Question

[William H. Magill]

On 30 Mar, 2004, at 19:26, Frank Flynn wrote:
> I have a 500Mhz Dual G4 with 768Mb of Ram.
>
> Today I launched iTunes and got a message "iTunes could not read your 
> Music
> Library because there is not enough free memory".
>
> So I launched "Activity Monitor" and saw that most of my Memory was
> "inactive" and that I had very little "free".  Rebooting fixed 
> everything
> (maybe logging out and back in or just quitting some stuff would have 
> too).
>
> But here's my question:  What do these things mean - "Wired" (isn't 
> all of
> it??),  "Active", "Inactive", "Used" and "Free" (well the last two make
> sense).

man vm_stat
should give you a "geek" explanation of what the terms mean.

The terms all relate to the paging system.

> And how did so much of my memory become inactive?

"Inactive" is not a bad thing in and of itself.
Some "process" has used (is using) memory and failed to release it.
This could be for any number of reasons.
Possibly a "memory leak."
Possibly simply the fact that you have a bunch of applications launched 
which are using memory. (I suspect this to be the case from your 
comment.)

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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