Pages must be classified as inactive before they are swapped out. That is what the quote from the Apple Developer site means when it says "These pages contain valid data but may be released from memory at any time. There are various ways of releasing pages; if the page was mapped from a file and has not been modified, it can be deleted immediately and re-read on demand. Similarly if it is memory that had been previously swapped out and not modified since it was swapped in.
Programs can also explicitly allocate cache and purgeable memory, to store data that can be forgotten and recreated on demand but the reason a program would allocate cache is if it takes significant time to recreate that data. But much of inactive memory is memory that programs have written valid data to, and paging out this data requires writing to swap. Therefore looking at the amount of "inactive" memory in Activity Monitor, and seeing that there is a lot of inactive at the same time as the computer is writing to swap, only tells you that the system is working as designed.
There is also a confusion between inactive memory and file cache. I'm not sure why there is that confusion, because Activity Monitor already lists them under separate headings. Cache is memory used to store recent data that have been read to or written from the file system, in case they need to be accessed again. When memory is low, OS X does tend to get rid of the the cache first. If you have swap thrashing, and Activity monitor shows a big pile of cache NOT inactive then that would be a problem.
But inactive memory is a different thing. If in doubt, ignore the distinction between "inactive" and "active. This is what every other operating system does when telling you about memory usage. Active pages now get classified inactive, then compressed which might show up as Kernel memory depending on what tools you are using, then written to swap as memory usage increases. Mavericks has also has stopped showing separate numbers for active and inactive in Activity Monitor, since it turns out not to be a useful thing to look at, especially given the misconceptions surrounding it.
There is currently no easy way of adjusting the swappiness or so it is called behavior of macos X. I guess you may want to read this answer also by me to have a more general review of what active, inactive and other memories in MacOSX: Wired Memory vs. Active Memory in OS X. The tool is free and pretty easy to use. Unlike the ActivityMonitor memory display, it only shows free memory, which seems to be a better indicator of swapping going on or not.
Need for speed — How to squeeze every last drop out of macOS
Starting with OS X The web was already then cluttered with complaints about system slowing down dramatically after some time. I finally managed to reproduce the problematic scenario, so i run the test and recorded the screen, into video. You can see on the video that free memory starts to drop very fast, and inactive is constantly rising. If you take a look at "bsdtar" command, it takes only a fragment of RAM, so the problem is not in this process. When the free memory dropped below mb, i started some apps, like Safari, iPhoto and MS Word, and you can see in the video, that it takes even minutes to start an app, when normally when there is free RAM , it would take some secs to load.
I run the same scenario and the same commands on my Linux Centos 6 box, no problem there! I bet there's no right answer to this. It's the same with the memory which remains active when you put your Mac to sleep, it just grows and grows with every sleep you make. On the "fun" a.
February 4, 2018. Originally posted on January 10, 2018
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Asked 8 years ago. Active 5 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 44k times. Correct me from wrong However, the amount of "Inactive" ram is typically around UPDATE mar Here is a round-up of the methods that have been suggested to help so far: The purge command "Used to approximate initial boot conditions with a cold disk buffer cache for performance analysis. Speeding up swap-allocation using dynamicpagerwrapper Seems a good thing to do in order to speed up swap-usage, but does not address the problem of osx swapping in the first place while there is still inactive memory.
Disabling swap by disabling dynamicpager and restarting This will force osx not to use swap to the price of the system hanging when all memory is used.
Disabling swap using a hacked dynamicpager Similar to disabling dynamicpager above, some excerpts from the comments to the blog post indicate that this is not a viable solution: "The Inactive Memory is high as usual". Motin Motin 2 2 gold badges 6 6 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. I've got this problem, illustrated by these Activity Monitor numbers: bassistance.
How To Disable Virtual Memory In OS X
Instead of reclaiming that, OSX prefers to start swapping heavily, as you can see by the 40 GB page outs. I've got plenty of free memory and there is still multiple GB of swap being used.
If a program reads or writes to a page, the flag is cleared. If, after some delay, the flag is not cleared, that page gets sorted into the "inactive" pile. If an "inactive" page is accessed by its program, it is put back into the "active" pile. When memory runs out, the "inactive" pages are paged out.
So, as you start from a blank slate, and open more and more programs, you can expect to see the following progression in Activity Monitor: First, there is a lot of "free" memory and very little inactive. This is because the memory flagger hasn't started running. As the amount of free memory drops, OS X will start running its memory flagger, and you will start to see the amount of "inactive" rising.
Each bit of "inactive" was previously "active.
Shared Memory Configuration
The memory-flagger will also be running full tilt sorting out memory into active and inactive. Typically, you will see a lot of "inactive" while swap is being written to, indicating that the memory-flagger is doing what it is supposed to. Thanks for your replies. Adjusting swappiness would definitely help - bummer that it aint easy!
The 2nd link refers to the problem of ever growing swap files. While and important issue especially when one is going low on swap files, it is not really relevant to my question in this thread I have been evaluating this app since your suggestion about two months ago.
How do I verify swap is activated or not?
It seems that this app indeed does increase the amount of "free" memory through various tricks, including aggressively claiming lots of memory for itself, then releasing it. However, this causes just the same amount of memory that it "freed" to be swapped out. This is to say it doesn't help releasing any memory, only moving memory contents from ram to the hd. Motin, I've used FreeMemory for months, and it does not do that, at least in my experience.
If I had to educated guess based on what I've seen in Activity Monitor , the difference is that FM consumes "active" memory first, which is prioritized over disk caches.
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It "frees" other memory by being higher in priority, then it frees its own memory. I've never seen it add to swap significantly maybe a small amount that's allocated while it's consuming. The memory management must be very broken in Mac OS X!