macOS RAM Usage
Users share experiences and debates about high RAM consumption on macOS, particularly M1 Macs, questioning if 8GB is sufficient for development and daily tasks while highlighting memory compression and aggressive caching.
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Similar experience on MacBook Pro m1. Sometimes it uses more than 2g ram. Crazy.
I have 16GB of RAM in my MBP. As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used. I'm not running any VMs, nor am I running any Adobe Products. Chrome, Spotify, Slack, Visual Studio Code, HipChat, Keynote, Sketch... this is a typical, yet light application load for me.
I'd consider that if it wasn't slowly eating all the available RAM on macOS.
All these things work with 8GB RAM. macOS uses all available RAM aggressively, so if you have 32GB RAM it will appear as what you are doing requires 32GB RAM, which is not the case.
Doesn't macOS compress memory on the fly, or something like that?
I don't understand... I routinely run my M1 Air with 4 instances of jetbrains IDEs, have dual screen, Safari with tens of tabs, additional apps like Rocket chat and more... and the machine never go past 8gb ram. What's going on with others ?
macOS use RAM aggressively, so it appear as your task requires more RAM than they actually do.
especially with OSX, where ram is guzzled like no other.
I have the same reaction. I suspect a lot of RAM is wasted by os's and applications.
It's memory management, not memory minimalism. I'm always hovering about 12 GB out of my 16 GB MBA, but never have any issue opening a project or opening 10–20 tabs (rookie number) and I have a few apps that are always running. I believe that macOS uses the RAM for caching files, so the reported usage is not really tied to the number of apps running. There are memory-heavy workflows, but these are outliers. Even 8 GB would be fine for most of what I do.