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14/16" 16GB of RAM, show us your memory pressure with YOUR workflow!

See my post in another thread, on memory usage in Lightroom with and without GPU acceleration enabled, here:

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For those of you who went with 16gb RAM on your new 14” or 16” MBP.

OK, I tried doing the same edits in Lightroom with and without the GPU acceleration enabled. With GPU acceleration enabled: With GPU acceleration disabled: Which I find very interesting. It supports my notion that the increased memory usage by Lightroom on the MBP M1 Pro is because it is...
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There is something up with Lightroom for sure, it’s using waaaay more ram than is reasonable for the tasks at hand. You can be editing iPhone photos and it’ll still chew the memory up.
 
lobotomy said:
So finally got around to properly setting up my 14" base model to test whether I would need 32GB... safe to say I need nowhere NEAR 32...

Attached my memory pressure and activity monitor below which consisted of the following: Rekordbox with some decks hooked up whilst actively mixing and powering the decks through my laptop, downloading 7/8 songs in the background on Mediahuman (although this happened absolutely lightning quick in comparison to my 2015 MBP (10 seconds vs about 2 mins) so not even sure it made a dent in the RAM pressure), had open Spotify, Soundcloud (app via Brave), Brave (about 5 tabs), Whatsapp, VPN, hooked up to a standard 23" HD external monitor.

Absolutely nothing was happening with the pressure so I thought alright let me chuck in a VM on UTM just for shets and gigs. Opened one up and ran some terminal programmes running... that tiny mm increase about halfway along the pressure bar is from the VM.

This is very typical use for me (I do no creative video/ photography work etc.) so safe to say that majority of people won't need 32GB and these laptops are crazy crazy fast and incredible at memory management - I was dead set on convincing myself I needed 32GB and was about to blow that money but so glad I bought one and tested, so just going for the 1TB model.

Also watch this if you haven't and are undecided 16 vs 32:

View attachment 1901887
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Yeah that maxtech video really shows you simply don't need 32gb unless you want prolong your ssd life. I just downgraded from a 32gb i9 2019 to a 16gb 2021 m1 pro and it's waaaay faster with the 2021 with multitasking. I would have gotten the 32gb but no Apple store has it in stock. I don't regret 16gb...yet.
 
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RemedyRabbit said:
I'm sure I'll be fine in the medium term but slightly worried about performance in 3/4 years time tbh.
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Ehhh, wouldn't be too worried. Some of that's probably on LightRoom and it should get better optimized over time. Also programs will increasingly be written for the M1 from the start.

Also, it's possible to run in the red for long stretches without significant actual use implications. I had an 8GB M1 this summer that almost never left the red zone and it was on par with my 32GB i7 doing the same workflows.

Just remember that there are a lot of 8GB M1 Airs out there and there'll be even more 4 years from now. Developers have an incentive to make sure their programs run on the widest install base possible. Even if Airs get higher base RAM soon, it's hard to see a world in which Airs come with 32GB default in 4 years.
 
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RemedyRabbit said:
There is something up with Lightroom for sure, it’s using waaaay more ram than is reasonable for the tasks at hand. You can be editing iPhone photos and it’ll still chew the memory up.
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Yes, it appears to be for the GPU acceleration in Lightroom. In my test, it sucks up about 9GB more for this. Which is a bit annoying, as GPU in Lightroom doesn't really do much, and Adobe recommends 4GB VRAM for the GPU. I wish one could limit the amount of VRAM used by Lightroom. It is probably assuming it can use all the RAM as VRAM. I wouldn't be surprised if you get 32GB RAM, Lightroom still tries to use it all. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but people may be chasing their tails trying to reduce memory pressure.

I should emphasize that I see no slowdown or hesitation as result of apparently high memory usage by Lightroom. If I didn't have activity monitor open I would not know this "issue" at all. Have had about 20 memory and processor intensive apps running simultaneously and can zip from one to the other. So far I have not found a good reason in terms of performance to return my 16GB MBP for a 32GB MPB, and I have been trying hard to make it suffer. There are other speculative reasons like SSD life, future needs, etc., but obviously I can't test for those.
 
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wilberforce said:
Yes, it appears to be for the GPU acceleration in Lightroom. In my test, it sucks up about 9GB more for this. Which is a bit annoying, as GPU in Lightroom doesn't really do much, and Adobe recommends 4GB VRAM for the GPU. I wish one could limit the amount of VRAM used by Lightroom. It is probably assuming it can use all the RAM as VRAM. I wouldn't be surprised if you get 32GB RAM, Lightroom still tries to use it all. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but people may be chasing their tails trying to reduce memory pressure.

I should emphasize that I see no slowdown or hesitation as result of apparently high memory usage by Lightroom. If I didn't have activity monitor open I would not know this "issue" at all. Have had about 20 memory and processor intensive apps running simultaneously and can zip from one to the other. So far I have not found a good reason in terms of performance to return my 16GB MBP for a 32GB MPB, and I have been trying hard to make it suffer. There are other speculative reasons like SSD life, future needs, etc., but obviously I can't test for those.
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Thanks. This was the single main factor making me consider returning mine, but in all my other usage I've not troubled the memory pressure at all. I'd like to think this is something that will be addressed in the coming months. I've noted that some folk with 32gb machines have seen Lightroom run out of application memory altogether which is ridiculous.
 
RemedyRabbit said:
Thanks. This was the single main factor making me consider returning mine, but in all my other usage I've not troubled the memory pressure at all. I'd like to think this is something that will be addressed in the coming months. I've noted that some folk with 32gb machines have seen Lightroom run out of application memory altogether which is ridiculous.
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Yeah, check this system report from Lightroom for "virtual memory used" of 401GB (On my iMac it reports 13GB virtual memory used.)

Image 11-3-21 at 5.28 PM.jpg


I assume this is a reporting bug, but it is still a bit amusing.
 
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wilberforce said:
There are other speculative reasons like SSD life, future needs, etc., but obviously I can't test for those.
Click to expand...

Here's a very long thread on the topic of SSD exhaustion in M1 Macs you can look through.

I ended up down that rabbit hole by way of a 512GB 13" M1 8GB MBP that was averaging in excess of .4TB of swap per day with a high of nearly 1TB in SSD writes in a single day. This was because I was putting incredible stress on it from my various VMs and photo programs all running on 8GB at the same time. I was intentionally stress testing it as part of my evaluation.

Even with my severe scenario, I calculated that I should expect a minimum of 3 years before the SSD would be exhausted if I were to continue at the pace I was on. I did ultimately return that laptop, but came to realize that it'll be quite difficult for most people to hit the SSD hard enough to exhaust its standard rating.
 
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Thanks, this thread has been most informative. Just one more week to go until I'm out of the return window and I stop allowing myself worry about this stuff ?
 
Glad I went with the M1 Pro, 16GB of memory, and 2TB SSD. I agree with the previous video of spending your money on more SSD instead of the absurd memory prices.

Will share my memory usage when it arrives this Friday and I set everything up.
 
Why should you put more money on ssd? You can attach USB C ssds with 1 gbyte/s read and write or even faster thunderbolt ssd's which are nearly as fast as the internal (5 gbyte/s read and write).
 
ASX said:
Why should you put more money on ssd? You can attach USB C ssds with 1 gbyte/s read and write or even faster thunderbolt ssd's which are nearly as fast as the internal (5 gbyte/s read and write).
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When the computer does swaps it writes to the SSD.
 
So get more ram. The ssd is degenerating too much when it swaps a lot. A soldered ssd isn't swappable. If the cells are weared out, you can throw this mac book away.
 
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ASX said:
So get more ram. The ssd is degenerating too much when it swaps a lot. A soldered ssd isn't swappable. If the cells are weared out, you can throw this mac book away.
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I am not sure this solves the swap issue. My Mac mini 2018 with 32GB of physical RAM currently has a 20GB swap on the 512GB internal SSD, 18.92 of it full. And this is with 28% memory pressure, and 11 GB 'free'. This is on the latest Big Sur build, so does not feature the current Monterey memory leaks.

I doubt you can solve the swap issue by simply upgrading RAM.
 
At least the swap would be smaller. So it's more healthy for the ssd. Otherwise the 16 gb versions swaps oftenly, i have never noticed it on the 32 gb version.
 
It's not blazing fast compared with the ram, only 100 - 5.3 GByte/s depending on the file size. The ram has 200 (pro) or 400 (max) gbyte/s.

@TheBigApple2006

Haven't seen this amount of swawp on M1 Max.
 
Mainly web browsing and one Java IDE, ram usage is around 60%, pressure always green, almost no swap usage. According to smartctl, after one week, SSD has 300GB written (note SSD only has 50GB occupied), not sure if this is normal.
 
This is very typical for me. I do web design/development and I often have a ton of tabs open in both Safari and Chrome. I also have about 4-6 Docker VM's running at any given time, Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, etc, Mail, Messages, along side Dropbox/OneDrive sync.

Screen Shot 2021-11-04 at 10.08.55 AM.png
 
ASX said:
So get more ram. The ssd is degenerating too much when it swaps a lot. A soldered ssd isn't swappable. If the cells are weared out, you can throw this mac book away.
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Agree
If you only have a few GB of swap at the end of day, I would say it's acceptable for me.
But if you got swap close to or even exceed the amount of RAM you have, you should really consider having more RAM.
 
Can anyone here post a workflow with a big project in Logic Pro, Pro Tools or Cubase? I mean, a project with tons of VI and the like.
 
PikachuEXE said:
Unless you got a big enough SSD to handle the write
I think you might need more RAM... or at least a bigger SSD
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The SSD is 512GB, handles things just fine. I don't use any pro app at all (Final Cut, Da Vinci, Premiere, etc.), only Chrome, PDF Viewer, a lot of open source scripts via brew, and my Memory pressure is mostly on the 30% range, so I can't see how upgrading the RAM would help....
 
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