The Windows task manager has a separate field called "Available". Right now I ha...

masklinn · on Feb 1, 2011

OSX's activity monitor does something similar, it has 4 statuses: Wired, Active, Inactive and Free.

Wired and Active are basically the RAM being used (Wired is a special activity status for stuff which can not be moved to disk), Inactive is the cache (generally programs which were used recently) and Free is… well, free.

When checking used/free, Inactive and Free count towards free, Wired and Active towards used (though that's not always consistent).

Also, I don't think you have 8TB RAM.

js2 · on Feb 1, 2011

If you really want the details on OS X, see http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Perform... and http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...

See http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix2000/freenix/full_papers/s... for information about the BSD unified buffer cache.

And see http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/linux-pdflush.htm for information about the Linux page cache.

barrkel · on Feb 1, 2011

He probably has 8GB of RAM (8192MB); some may be lost to address space holes. I have 12GB, if you're finding that implausible.

masklinn · on Feb 1, 2011

> He probably has 8GB of RAM (8192MB)

Yes, I'd expect that, but at the time of my comment (before his stealth edit) all his units read "GB" not "MB". I wrote "8 TB" for a reason.

> I have 12GB, if you're finding that implausible.

I have 8GB RAM in my laptop, why would I find 12GB RAM implausible?