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I have about 2 GB or more memory that I don't know what its used for. When I restart my computer with no applications running, the used memory is 4 GB, and when I open browsers its over 7 GB used from 8 GB total.

I checked the Activity Monitor, nothing is using more memory than it should be. I am also using Memory Clean app but I don't get more free RAM.

How to solve this? …or even debug my memory usage?

MacBook Pro, late-2011, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, 8 GB RAM

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    "Unused memory is wasted memory" ... why do you want to waste memory?
    – GEdgar
    Nov 22, 2013 at 16:00
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    There's nothing to solve here. You should learn about memory management. The OS will keep as much in memory as much it can even seemingly outdated data that might be needed again (think of undo actions, reopened browser tabs, etc.)
    – marekful
    Nov 22, 2013 at 16:02

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There's nothing to solve here. You should learn about memory management. The OS will keep as much in memory as much it can even seemingly outdated data that might be needed again (think of undo actions, reopened browser tabs, etc.)

However, if really needed to free up some memory, you can use the purge command in a terminal window.

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I'm wondering what you're seeing that makes you think you don't have free memory. The way that the virtual memory system of Unix works, you'd expect about 10% to show up as "Free" in the way Activity Monitor displays memory on a normally running system. (You need a little headroom in order to actually do the tasks of managing memory, so the operating system squirrels that away for this purpose.)

The "Inactive" number would be a better thing to look at, as it would tell you how much memory is currently unallocated to any process.

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    That's not what "inactive memory" means. If it's unallocated to any process it's "free," and if it can be instantly reclaimed it's "purgeable." Inactive memory is memory that has been allocated and used by process, but the OS has noticed it hasn't been touched in a while. Inactive memory is the first to get paged out to disk. See developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/performance/…
    – crowding
    Nov 27, 2013 at 21:45

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