Suspend or Shut down

I have two questions regarding my mac after using parallels.

1. For the best performance on my mac is it better to shut down or suspend parallels? The obvious answer I would think is to shut down but does it make much of a difference?

2. I've noticed that after using parallells I have a lot more inactive system memory then I should and this is after I suspend or shut down. The only way to solve this that I've noticed is to restart my mac... is there a better solution?

 

1. In terms of performance it's irrelevant if you suspend or shutdown.

2. Inactive memory is something to be managed by the OS, inactive memory is like free memory but is only consumed when there's little free memory, basically inactive memory is the memory used by programs that aren't running but if you start them again they start faster. You shouldn't really care much about inactive memory and just let OS X manage it. If you really want to purge it, it's possible and there are a series of tools out there that do are able to do that, I know Onyx can do this (among many other things).

 

Regarding inactive memory, when I first started using parallels after I shut it down I felt as if my macs performance was sluggish and inactive memory seemed to be the one area I could point to. As of late i'm not sure if it is hindering performance as much.

From your experience would you say that the increased inactive memory and decreased free memory is pretty negligible?

Thanks again for your response.

 

I didn't say the difference is negligible, I said it's the function of the OS to manage inactive memory.