> Anyway, I’d remind everyone that “using” RAM doesn’t mean “would not function with less RAM.”

> Many applications just use a lot if it’s available.

Some of that memory isn't going to be touched again, and will eventually be moved to swap, but it still pushed things out of RAM to be there and is a troublemaker.

The rest of that memory will be needed again, so if it gets swapped out it'll lag badly when you switch back to the program.

Either way 99% of programs are not doing any kind of intelligent use of spare memory. If you see them doing something that looks wasteful, that's because they're being wasteful.

The one thing to remember is that at the OS level, disk cache pretty much qualifies as free memory. But that's unrelated to this issue.