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My computer (brand new) was using 12 Gb of RAM so after I was done exporting my video I force-quit everything and 8 minutes later it's still using 5Gb or RAM, is this normal?! It seems like so much!

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*Note: I only have 1 finder window open and it's just viewing the utilities folder, I used it to get to the "Activity Monitor" app.

Thanks! God bless!

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    You shuld look at the Virtual memory column in Activity Moninitor. – mmmmmm May 14 '13 at 18:24
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    It's completely normal, and running purge would probably only make things slower. See apple.stackexchange.com/questions/67031/… for an explanation of different types of memory. – Lri May 14 '13 at 18:35
  • Nothing to worry about unless you see slow downs when you continue working or a restart doesn't clear it. Active and Wired were not very high, and until you open up more intensive processes it has no reason to clear the ram. Processes are very repetitive, anything that's in ram is 99.9% likely to be used again, so it would actually be very bad for it to clear that information every chance it gets. – FaultyJuggler May 14 '13 at 20:00
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Sometimes the RAM doesn't clear properly - try running "purge" from the terminal - this will (as close as possible) clear the inactive RAM for you.

Also, the more RAM you have, the more your computer will use when idle for the background processes. This is normal and it won't get in the way of your performance.

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5GB is normal - that's the (good/expected) benchmark I have used for my own question about 19 GB of RAM used Over 19GB RAM used by Catalina even with all GUI applications closed

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