Mac really slow and I barely have free RAM

[Rui Nakata]

Recently I've been experiencing a lot of freezing as frequently as every 15 minutes. My Macbook Pro is almost 3 years old. I also just restarted my computer a few minutes ago and I only have safari open with two tabs open and 3.99 GB of my RAM is already being used up by random things that I don't understand. Do I have a memory leak? If so, how do I fix that without resetting my computer to factory settings? I just installed so many things like git, Xcode, home-brew, ruby stuff and I don't want to lose it all especially because it took me so long to figure out how to install them. Please help!!!

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Your memory usage looks totally normal to me. I have 4 GB of RAM and mine shows 3.27 GB used already with only Safari, iTunes, and Mail open. Remember that Mac OS X dynamically allocates/adjusts RAM on the fly, so don't worry about your RAM usage until you start to see a lot in the Swap Used: section.

The freezing is probably being caused by another issue. I see you have Sophos installed. That could be causing the freeze if you have real-time scanning enabled. Also, freezing is frequently caused by a failing hard drive or a low amount of free space remaining on your hard drive.

-How much free space is left on your drive?
-Have you tried turning off/disabling any real-time scanning in Sophos?
-Did this just start happening recently?
-How many apps do you have open simultaneously?
-Do you have other background processes like DropBox, Carbonite, etc. running as well as Sophos?

C

 

[Rui Nakata]

Cory,
Thank you for your reply! That actually makes sense because I do have a lot of movies on my hard drive. This is the breakdown, I should probably delete some... Also, what can the "other" be? I'm guessing they are also movies that weren't detected as movies but I'm not really sure.

I changed the preferences for the Sophos and hopefully it'll get faster! Freezing started happening about 3months ago and at the same time my computer became very slow. I had to stop using google chrome because it became too slow thats why I reverted back to safari. I usually only have about 3 apps running simultaneously and I do not have other background processes running that I know of.

Rui

 

[Cory Cooper]

Not a problem.

The amount of free space you have is not too bad, but freeing up some may help a little. The Other category would be things like documents, email, OS files, etc.

I see you have Bradford Security Agent (Client Security Agent and bndaemon) running as well...that can slow down Internet access. Were/are you required to use that for school/work?

Let me know if the Sophos change helps any.

C

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

I agree with Cory about normality of Ram usage, one question why do you run the security agent?

Also it may pay to run permission repair from disk utility, but do this two or three times, once done reset Safari as well.
Just my thoughts.