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Dont understand activity monitor and login items


Tropdoug

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Hi,

I have 32Gb of RAM and an Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics card, but when rendering a movie the resultant mp4 seems jerky. I am not sure if this is because the graphics card is not working to its capabilities or alternatively the RAM is not being used correctly. 

 

Herve pointed me to activity monitor, but when I open it I see a whole host of programs that are taking up RAM but which I don't want actively running. i.e. I have Adobe premier Pro on this machine at present, and Adobe creative cloud installer app is shown as active and taking up 22.4 Mb of RAM, I don't want that app running until I choose to open it. See attachment

 

Originally when I opened Activity Monitor it showed Memory Used as 29.3 GB. After a reboot, the below screen shot showed 4.42GB being used. 

 

If I start an app, and then close it later does it still continue to use RAM in the background? I leave my computer on all week, putting the display to sleep each night and only rebooting once a week. 

 

In Login items there is only one item ticked and only three in total, iTunes (unticked) Canon Scanner (Ticked) and DropBox (unticked)  see 2nd attachment. 

 

How do I stop the apps I do not want running all the time in background, from starting up on boot? 

 

and can someone explain why the apps shown in activity monitor are not show in login, (I suspect I am having a disconnect in my head over the way MAC OS X shows system information, but I could benefit from clarification) 

 

Thanks

 

 

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Mmm, this is basic OS X operation. I bet you just click on the little red button at top left corner of an app to close it, don't you? That does not close the app, just the window and the app usually still runs in background (with active icon in Dock usually unless you chose to keep the icon on the Dock of course). To properly close an app, you have to click on the 1st menu item and select Quit or do a Command-Q.

 

It's not meant for that, but another way to check which apps are running is to select the Force Quit facility available via the Apple menu. That lists all active apps so that you can manually kill an app that has run into trouble.

 

Since you never actually close any app, your RAM naturally fills up to the point where it may run out. Your issue is a simple matter of lack of knowledge on how to operate OS X. I'm tempted to say: RTFM... the purpose of this site and forum is not to replace it!

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Thank you Herve

 

Yes I am guilty as charged. :?    My apologies. At this moment though there are many things I don't understand about MAC OSx and finding time to laboriously go through a manual online is not a possibility, given the workload I am under. 

 

However I will try in future to find other resources to answer these learning issues. I remain grateful for all the help you and others have given me on this journey.

 

8-)

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