Something with my memory has become ...

Principle of operation OS X memory is markedly different from that in Windows, which causes a lot of confusion at the switchers. For example, seeing that quantitative free memory (free memory) is only a few megabytes, they panic, thinking that this will inevitably be followed by strong brakes system...

Fortunately, it is not. Below we will try to outline some popular basics of working with the memory system and the fact that you should know about it. So, open Activity monitor and look.

Wired memory, the smallest value represents the amount of data that can not be flushed, and must remain in RAM. Active memory displays the amount of data in RAM, which is actively used by the system and applications.

Inactive memory. These data are not used, but remain in memory as long as any application does not need additional memory. In fact, the use of inactive memory will allow you to almost instantly back to work back-end applications. Free memory. The amount of unused memory that could well be of the order of 10-15 MB.

That is, estimating the amount of memory available can be considered inactive memory is "free". By and large figure free memory you should not worry, because a large amount of system memory available available only at the beginning, immediately after the launch, no matter how much RAM you have available. The only thing which really be feared, because it is active swap (page ins / outs), which usually indicates the need for speedy increase of RAM.

As practice shows, for comfortable work in OS X 10.4 Tiger (internet, office, watching movies, etc.) is enough gigabytes of memory. With regular use of virtual machines (Parallels / VMWare Fusion) or working with "heavy" applications, it makes sense to increase the RAM up to 2 GB.