OS X Lion: 8GB of RAM, 20MB free I have a Macbook Pro (early 2011) running OS X Lion and while running a few apps that only take up, say, 200 MBs of space each (Xcode, Spotify, and Photoshop), my wired memory shoots up to 1.4GB, my active to 4.39GB, inactive to 2.18GB, and free 28.3MB. Note: this happens with different apps at times, not just a combination of these three.

The issue is so bad that programs lag so badly that there are seconds of delays when, for example, clicking on a label to edit text. Even the Spotify music starts to stutter, but the CPU usage isn't very high (less than 10% used).

Is this common? Besides restarting, is there something I can do to fix this? Perhaps it's something not relating to memory?
Apple documentation on memory says that


  The inactive list contains pages that are currently resident in physical memory but have not been accessed recently. These pages contain valid data but may be released from memory at any time.


inactive + free can be considered as the free memory