Is OSX known for high RAM usage?

[The Seventh One]

Hi all,

I'm a newcomer when it comes to Mac as I've only had this MBA a few weeks and I'm really chuffed with it... but tonight I opened resource monitor and I was totally shocked.

I had literally no apps or programs running and 5.5GB of RAM was being used, I've now restarted and still have 2.5GB used which seems a bit high for idle if you ask me. There is nothing that stands out in terms of one particular process eating up a large chunk but there was a ton of small processes.

Is this normal for a Mac or has something gone wrong somewhere, perhaps with the Mavericks upgrade?

Many thanks for any help!

 

[The Seventh One]

Thanks for the replies all, admittedly I haven't noticed any slowdown. It was more of a curiosity thing as I'm not used to seeing that much utilisation in Windows unless I've got a lot of stuff going on!