Ever Want To Inspect Ram In Real-Time? Enter TOP

Notice the top 5 lines, a wealth of information resides here!  Directing your attention to the bottom two lines in the header, the beginning line Physical Memory at its end is 37.2M free representing the amount of free memory.  Which is why I pulled up TOP in the first place.  I am running a new build of FireFox for the MacIntel... It appears to be sucking memory and I am using TOP to confirm it.  As you can see above Dashboard is a little memory piggy, but FireFox is chewing 370MB of real memory and 1.86 GB of virtual.  So I'm taken her down and will get a snap shot of memory from TOP after Firefox onloads.  Then lets reload it and take another shot of it on startup.

FireFox Unloaded: Returns back memory to the pool.  The amount a free memory increases to 338M.  It appears Firefox gave back 10x the memory.

Just for the heck of it lets remove the dashboard and see the results:

Interestingly enough we see the free RAM increase to 459M.  That's almost 121MB back to the system.  That's somewhat expected, but it tells us the Dashboard apps tend towards a RAM hog!  We have to ask what value does the dashboard give us to consume 100+ MB of ram.  In this system 100M represents 5% of total RAM.   This maybe an acceptable percentage for this system.  However,  in systems with less ram it could be a poor use of resource.  TOP let's us see that verry quickly!

Loading FireFox now we can see how much the free ram goes down.

FireFox consumes about 70M.  With one tab open.  So we get a good picture as to where the memory and and what processes are running from initial startup.

Of course Activity Monitor is available to MAC OS X users.  However, I use TOP day in and day out and find it a valuable tool!