find what's producing inactive memory First of all i'd like to ask politely for all of those who feel the need to explain it to me how perfect apple's memory management is to ignore this thread.

A little background:

The theory goes that if you have lots of inactive memory - it's can be freed for applications that need it. It's like free memory according to apple and their blind followers. And i like the idea of it, but... in practice: when free memory hits low numbers and inactive hits high numbers - osx (at least snow leopard) slows down ... So even if the inactive memory is being freed - it is done very very slow and that's not acceptable.

But for some reason the problem has just gotten worse for me: i've just noticed that inactive memory keeps piling up faster than ever. I've done a couple of purges just to confirm my theory and ... the number gets high again very fast ...

So until apple fixes whatever is wrong with their memory management - i'd at least like to know which apps are producing the inactive memory.

Is there a way to somehow monitor processes and see how much memory they allocate and free during their lifetime?

Thanks for your thoughts
I have had some success using the terminal command top.  Much the same results as Activity Monitor, but I can slow down the update speed, and sort on any field.

In my experience, the problem is usually with individual programs that fail to free memory. You will see the memory for that process creep up.  See 'man top' for details about the various fields that top reports.  Firefox is notorious for this, and with 60 or so tabs requires a restart every few days

If you want to dig deeper, vmmap can give you the status of pages owned by a particular process.  

Be warned:  sometimes slowdowns are CPU related.  Sometimes disk i/o related, althoth the latter is less common with current memory prices.