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makeli

12 GB of RAM and 12 MB of free memory?!?

Full disclosure, I'm running a virtual machine which is a guzzler, around 4 GB. Is it normal to still gobble up 8GB on OSX?
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rlines

rlines

take a look at the Activity monitor and the System Memory tab to see how much is used for various items.

Looking at my system currently I have 70MB of free memory on an 8GB MBP with a VM that uses 3 gb of memory. But I have about 1.8GB of inactive memory.

Check out this blog post that does a great job of summing up the various types so you can tell a bit if you are using all your memory and need to add more or if things are all good.

sg80bab.blogspot.com­/2007­/03­/is­-my­-mac­-using­-too­-m...

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Bownse

Bownse

Concur. Check the activity monitor. Also look for lots of closed-but-not-QUIT apps, multiple tabs in browsers, etc. All of these eat free memory that can be released by quitting them. This goes for your OS X primary OS as well as your Virtual Machine.
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