Some users have noticed that after running EyeTV for an extended period of time, the ‘Activity Monitor’ utility reports that their computer has very little “Free” memory available, and that this memory is not freed after quitting the EyeTV application. This leads to the perception that EyeTV is “holding on” to this memory even after quitting.

Having very little “Free” memory is actually not a problem for your computer, and is a function of Mac OS X’s memory caching system. The ‘Wired’ and ‘Active’ memory regions denote memory that is allocated to specific applications, and necessary for them to function. The ‘Inactive’ memory is used by Mac OS X as a buffer cache where commonly used files can be stored for quick access. This improves the overall performance of your system.

Mac OS X coordinates the use of this ‘Inactive’ buffer cache, along with the page cache which is written to the hard disk. Inactive memory is still available to applications when necessary, but Mac OS X’s memory manager specifically does not free the memory until the system is restarted.

For more information regarding Mac OS X’s memory usage, please read the following kbase article: Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor