Why is my RAM nearly fully used? I bought a Macbook Pro 15 inches 3 months ago. It's running on Mac OS X Snow Leopard and it has 4GB of RAM.

I consider having a fair use of this computer :
- surfing (Chrome)
- developing (Fraise)
- gaming

But after some hours of use, here is what happens :



It's in french but you can easily see that only some tens of MB (Mo) are still available, whereas the sum of all launched processes is far to reach 4GB...  

So where the hell did my RAM go ?
There's more memory available there than you think. "Inactive" memory is memory that has been used, and is essentially keeping its old data so that it can be swiftly grabbed again if needs be. However, if your computer needs the memory for some new process, that memory is capable of being used - the old data is dropped out, and new data is put in.

As others have said, you also need to show all processes for a full idea of what's going on with your memory. But you're not nearly as tapped out as it first appears.