Excessive Memory Usage?

[Robert Ludlow]

Hi, I have a 2017 iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch) with 16 GB of RAM and a 250 GB solid state drive installed by Apple. I mainly use the Internet and Photoshop CC 2018 for image editing. Right now Clean My Mac shows only 7 GB of free RAM, and the only Apps open are the Safari browser and the Apple App Store. My previous iMac had only 12 GB of RAM, and it seemed to go further before I had to do something to free up more.

Thanks for any ideas and suggestions.

 

[honestone]

Memory usage is always a perplexing issue. I only have 4 gig of RAM in each of my Macs, and after starting up each machine, about 1.5 to 1.7 gig of RAM is used. (I am not loading anything at start up (at least via my own choice)). Then of course as I run (single thread only) apps, more of the available RAM gets "devoured". Most apps are "pretty good" about giving back the RAM they have consumed, but that is not always the case. The two main apps I use are Outlook 2016 for my EMail, and Google Chrome for internet browsing.

I use two memory clean apps (Memory Clean 2 on my Mac Mini, and FreeRam Booster 2 on my MacBook Air. They do help in recovering RAM.

By the way, be careful with CleanMyMac. Quite a few folks around here have mentioned it being as bad as the nefarious MacKeeper. I myself use the excellent freeware program Onyx for cleaning out some stuff, along with Tech Tool Pro (and my own disk cleanup efforts).

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Open the Activity monitor and see where all the memory is being used.
I just checked the memory usage on my iMac with 24gb, I have a few apps that load at startup and freshly booted it shows 3.5gb used. With my typical apps open it gets up to 6.25gb, that is running X Code, Pixelmator, Sublime text, Idle, Safari and Mail.
I would echo honestone's warning on CleanMyMac.

Another thought is that photoshop will use a lot of memory if you are editing images as it will use available RAM to store quite a lot of info for levels of undo etc.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

Just checked the memory usage on my iMac with Photoshop CC ( with 1 image open) and Safari running and it shows 9.5gb used.

 

[honestone]

Just checked the memory usage on my iMac with Photoshop CC ( with 1 image open) and Safari running and it shows 9.5gb used.

I am using my mid 2013 13" MacBook Air, and I am only running Google Chrome. The amount of the 4 gig of RAM that I have left is about 1.25 gig.

I know that Tech Tool Pro and 1Password have "agents" that run in the background, but they do not consume much memory at all.