(To do so, you can press F4 on most Mac keyboards, or swipe left with four fingers on a trackpad.) The iStat Pro widget is shown below.
Just download and install iStat Pro and then open Dashboard. If you’re an avid Dashboard user, this is a good way to keep tabs on how much RAM is free and allocated. IStat Pro is a free Dashboard widget that provides tons of system information about your Mac, including memory usage. Keep an eye on that Dock icon! You want there to be enough green (which represents free memory) to open other applications. Now you have a way to monitor your Mac’s memory usage in real time. The Activity Monitor Dock icon turns into a pie chart which displays how your memory is allocated. To turn the Activity Monitor Dock icon in to a real time memory monitoring tool, right click on the Dock icon and select Dock Icon → Show Memory Usage, as shown below. (Ideally, your Mac should have 10% of the total memory available at any given time.) If the free memory number looks too low, you should quit some applications to free up memory. Now the bottom part of the window shows exactly how much free memory is currently available. This is a good way to see which applications are using the most memory on your Mac - the memory hogs are displayed at the top of the list.Ĭlick the System Memory button. (It’s in Applications → Utilities.) The window shown below appears.Ĭlick the Real Mem column header to sort the active processes by memory usage.
Here’s how to use Activity Monitor to monitor your Mac’s memory usage: Just follow these instructions to concentrate on the memory statistics. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what it all means. In fact, Activity Monitor presents so much information that it’s easy to get overwhelmed when looking at it. You can use this application to see how much RAM is currently free, how much RAM is currently allocated, and a whole lot more. By the time you get to the end of the article, you’ll be a memory-monitoring pro! Using Activity MonitorĪctivity Monitor is a free application that comes bundled with every Mac. This tutorial covers three of them: Activity Monitor, iStat Pro, and iStat Menus. There are a couple different tools you can use to see how much memory your Mac is using. You can see how much RAM is currently available on your Mac and stop potential problems before they start!
That’s why it’s important to monitor your Mac’s memory usage in real time.
Of course, since RAM memory stores the code and instructions for OS X and any applications open on your Mac, running out of it can slow your Mac down, or worse.
Most people have no idea how much RAM is installed in their Mac, or how much memory it is currently using. In short, you’d be driving blind - hoping, by chance, that everything would just work out okay.Īs ludicrous as this scenario sounds, millions of Mac users do essentially the same thing every day. You wouldn’t know how fast the car was going, how much fuel it had left, or whether or not the engine was about to overheat. Imagine driving a vehicle with no gauges on the dashboard. The iPhone app however isn’t free, but at just a dollar or two for the download, it’s just as gorgeous and in many cases even more functional.AirPort Apple Apps Backups Developer Education Email Hardware Internet iPad iPhone Mac Music Network Photos Security TV Weekend Wonk What’s crazier is that the widget is completely free! If the Dashboard isn’t your cup of tea, you can go ahead and check out iStat Menus, which adds little counters to your OS X menubar.ījango also makes iStat Pro for the iPhone, which uses a server applet to send similar data that can be viewed on the iPhone from a remote location. IStat pro is a highly configurable widget that lets you monitor every aspect of your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes. It’s also the most functional of the lot. Right from its first iteration, iSlayer (now Bjango) created one of the most delicious widgets for the Mac. IStat Pro is possibly the only reason I continue to use the Dashboard. Monitor your system through delicious pixels