That's not a solution, that's a workaround. I'm sitting here with a 4GB RAM machine running Arch Linux with XMonad. I usually run the following applications in day to day usage:
- Firefox Nightly with 50-100 tabs (largest memory hog,
the rest doesn't even come close)
- Thunderbird
- Pidgin
- XChat
- smplayer, which I usually keep open
- deluge
- mpd + ncmpcpp
- half to one dozen of terminator instances with zsh,
most running some text mode applications like vim,
htop or the aforementioned ncmpcpp
I reboot my PC once in a blue moon, usually after kernel updates. otherwise it's running 24/7. Right now, I sit at ~35% memory (and that should include memory used for disk caching), a bit less than half of which is Firefox with ~16% (65 tabs). I usually never go over 50% unless compiling heavy stuff (like QT level heavy). I don't really know what the fuck OS X does to eat all that RAM, but it apparently does something wrong.
Emulating a setup similar to yours, the OSX machine infront of me sits a 2.8GB active, of which a little less than 800MB are taken by Terminal.app due to me having activated infinite scrollback and having two rails processes being hit 8 hours a day since like forever as I develop. So it's really closer to 2GB and I didn't even try hard. This includes mds+mdworker (the indexer) which clocks in at 200MB. Normally I also have LibreOffice, Pixelmator, iCal, iTunes, Reeder, VMWare Fusion, which makes it balloon to 3.1GB and up as I open more documents/VMs.
That's not a solution, that's a workaround. I'm sitting here with a 4GB RAM machine running Arch Linux with XMonad. I usually run the following applications in day to day usage:
I reboot my PC once in a blue moon, usually after kernel updates. otherwise it's running 24/7. Right now, I sit at ~35% memory (and that should include memory used for disk caching), a bit less than half of which is Firefox with ~16% (65 tabs). I usually never go over 50% unless compiling heavy stuff (like QT level heavy). I don't really know what the fuck OS X does to eat all that RAM, but it apparently does something wrong.