Memory appears to be almost always at 100% (OS X 10.9)

[mseymour]

At least under OS X 10.9.3, memory seems to be constantly at around 98–100%.

This is probably due to how Mavericks works with RAM, although I could be wrong.

[MrRio]

Yeah this is a tricky one to tackle. Activity monitor reports memory used as 3.92GB there, so 3.92GB/4GB would be 98%.

I'm going to look at a few different options. Something more like Apple's memory pressure calculation would be useful.

[danthegoodman]

I would find it useful to change the memory usage color or saturation based upon the type. App memory could be the brightest, followed by wired memory, then file cache and compressed. OSX 10.8 had this feature with it's activity monitor, but they took it away with 10.9

[hoelzro]

I'm experiencing this on Linux as well. I think it's accurate, though; it's just that a good chunk of memory is being used by filesystem buffers. A better metric might be to subtract the amount of memory used by these.

[jvonmitchell]

Confirmed as issue on linux. If filesystem buffers are included it will always be near 100% because that cache is designed to consume all the remaining ram.

Reading the source code for htop I see they are just reading the /proc/meminfo file. They grab totalMem and freeMem and then usedMem = totalMem - freeMem.

Here is the relevant file.

https://github.com/hishamhm/htop/blob/f0e2a0e77157104dfc36d0c753fba67d0986f071/ProcessList.c

[kriskhaira]

I'm having the same issue with vtop 0.5.5 on Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.3.

Here are two screenshots showing RAM usage in vtop, Activity Monitor and iStat Menus. Activity Monitor and iStat Menus show consistent stats.

It looks like vtop does not consider the memory file cache as free. See the following calculation based on numbers from the Activity Monitor screenshot.

> (11.78 + 3.59) / 16 * 100
96.0625

vtop:

Activity Monitor:

iStat Menus:

[donut]

Getting this issue on Ubuntu 14.04.3 as well making the memory graph pretty much useless. Would be cool to see color coding and more useful percentage. htop handles this well. Comparison of vtop and htop running at the same time:

[GottZ]

Arch Linux is affected too:

Would be cool to see color coding

true but it would look awkward since you cannot overlay characters in any terminal i know of.

[wyw]

#11