[LOCKED DUPLICATE] The Free/Inactive RAM issue

[D A]

I'm getting a little tired of the Free/Inactive RAM issue now as it makes my MBP slow to a crawl at times as it tries to write the contents of the RAM to the virtual memory on the disk.

I know the developers have said that Inactive RAM is available for the OS to use at any time but the problem is that OS X seem to want to use Free RAM first, even if it's far from enough, and at the top of that, it wants to write to virtual memory before it starts using this Inactive RAM. I presume this is how the OS is designed to use the RAM, but it could just as well be a bug. The developers have also said it's nothing they can do once the RAM is marked as Inactive.

My question: Why does Transmission have to go through such vast amounts of memory? It seems like it allocates some memory, uses, then releases it before starting the process all over again. How come Transmission is the only application that produces this problem? How exactly does Transmission handle the allocation of memory?

It seems like this memory allocation issue is related to the files being downloaded. A little earlier I was downloading a 10+ GB file and once I had completed download/seeding I removed the download from Transmission and closed Transmission. After that I opened Finder to copy the file to an external hard drive followed by the deletion of the original downloaded file. As soon as the file was deleted all Inactive RAM was restored to Free RAM!

So why does OS X consider the RAM to be free once the file is gone? Is there any way for Transmission to invoke this behavior on purpose?

So far I've only tested this on Transmission 1.75 on my Late 2008 MBP 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM, stock 250 GB 5400 rpm hard drive running Snow Leopard 10.6.2.

[jetak]

I am having similar issues with transmission. It will use large amounts of RAM, labeling it inactive. This slows the computer down substantially, and the only way to free the RAM is to quit Transmission, move and delete the original file that was being downloaded.

[Inuyasha]

I have this problem as well. My computer gets slowed down substantially when Transmission is running and it's directly correlated to the "inactive" memory descending to <20MB.

[Jordan]

This thread appears to be a duplicate of this thread. To reduce clutter and confusion in the forums, I'm going to close this thread and ask that the discussion be continued in the other thread instead. Thank you!