I have noticed my Mac getting slower and slower and lately. Even when I have very few applications open, it seems to drag a lot, swap to disk often, lag, and so forth. When I open up Activity Monitor, it invariably shows very little free and inactive memory.
I’ve been insanely busy lately, so I haven’t had time to do anything about it or investigate - I just assumed that there was a memory leak somewhere, and that my Mac (after three years) was slowly getting loaded up with more and more crap, and grinding to a halt.
This disappointed me greatly, because it was exactly the kind of flaky behavior that I thought I had escaped by switching from Windows. I figured I’d eventually have to reinstall the OS - how embarassing would that be, after I told all my friends about how that’s not necessary on Macs?
And then today, having presented my final project and gotten my life back, I took a closer look at my memory usage after powering the machine on, and opening only a few applications.
23% (58 MB) free/inactive, it said.
“Uh…what?”, I said to myself. That can’t be right. I checked System Profiler, and sure enough, it was only showing 256 MB of RAM installed.
I powered off the machine, reseated the DIMMS and cleaned their contacts, rebooted, and checked again. Back to 1GB.
Everything is running liquid smooth again. No idea what happened with the RAM - maybe I accidentally kicked the thing and knocked some loose or something.
It’s nice to have it reaffirmed that someone, somewhere still knows what they’re doing. I was getting worried for a minute, thinking I’d have to go back to Linux.