16” MBP is using a lot of ram at idle.

[LoganT]

Looking at it right now and it’s using 20GB of ram (I have 64). The only applications I have open are Little Snitch and iStat Menu 6.

I picked up my Core i9 2.4 GHZ, 64GB, 4TB SSD with 8500m 8GB on Wednesday the day before Thanksgiving. Everything was working perfectly. Screen looks great and I don’t even have the dreaded popping audio problems.

I have a theory on what’s causing it.

Because I’m a huge idiot and like to fix things that aren’t broken I decided to format the drive completely and reinstall Catalina so I’d have an even purer version (I know I know). That’s where my issue starts. I wanted to be extra secure so I formatted my SSD in APFS-Encrypted and when I finished installing that’s when the problems arose. The speakers are popping whenever I start and stop an audio track. Mind you, this is only in FCPX and not the music app which works fine.

I’ve read that there are some issues with doing an APFS-Encrypted format and I was thinking maybe that’s what’s causing the problem. I think I’m going to format in non encrypted APFS, reinstall and then enable FileVault.

Any idea what might be going on?

 

[patwithamac]

What you are seeing is most likley business as usual. Nothing is wrong.
*nix like systems (MacOS included) strive to make use of all available memory. So, the tendency (correctly so) is to strive for 100% in-use. When there's mem available, it'll get used for things like file cache. When pressure rises, file cache will be evicted in favor of other demands.

Whether the filesystem is formatted APFS encrypted (or not) will have no effect. What specifically leads you to believe "that's what's causing the problem"? What problem? Is there a problem?

If your system wasn't making maximal use of all available ram, even under light load, then that's when you should be concerned.

What are you looking at to conclude that "it's using 20GB of ram"?

Can you post a screen-shot of Activity monitor's Memory tab (as in this example)?

 

[LoganT]

I just left my place but I’ll be back in an hour, then I’ll take a screenshot. I was looking at the Activity Monitor>Memory Tab>Memory Used

 

[patwithamac]

I'll be counting sheep by the time you get back.
Hopefully others here will weigh in after posting your screen shot.
But, it sounds to me like Working-As-Designed.

 

[LoganT]

Here's a photo of my current Activity Monitor.

 

[Howard2k]

Looks fine. The more memory you have the more it will use. The memory pressure is almost zero. I don’t think mine is that low from a fresh boot and without opening anything.

 

[stix666]

My memory usage looks similar (also 64Gb). The machine is much smoother and faster for simple tasks like loading big pages in Safari, than my previous MacBook Pro (16Gb, 2016, quad i9). I suspect that contrary to much of the advice on this forum, more memory improves performance even for applications that are not associated as being memory hogs. Maybe the OS simply is not that well optimised for RAM

 

[alfogator]

Here's a photo of my current Activity Monitor. View attachment 879997

Can you sort the list by clicking the memory column so it shows the Processes that are using the most memory first.
15 GB app memory for a system with no open apps sounds quite high.

 

[iMacDragon]

Can you sort the list by clicking the memory column so it shows the Processes that are using the most memory first.
15 GB app memory for a system with no open apps sounds quite high.

It was already ordered by real memory used, which is the column that should add upto 15gb. And I would agree, nothing out of normal, system with more memory will use more memory.

 

[matram]

MacOS is at its foundation a Unix system. Unix is generally regarded to be very efficient with resources. You can after all run it on things like a Raspberry Pi.

What I believe we see is RAM caching, i.e. instead of swapping out currently unused pages of memory to SSD they are kept in RAM.

For that to have an impact you really need to have many applications open at the same time (or web pages in Chrome) and switch a lot back and forth between them instead of reading back pages from a swap file on disk you are using much faster RAM.

But as with any cache for it to be useful, you have to "hit it". If you for instance work with huge sets of data that you access sequentially you will not use the cache, hence the memory is wasted.

I suspect that contrary to much of the advice on this forum, more memory improves performance even for applications that are not associated as being memory hogs. Maybe the OS simply is not that well optimised for RAM

 

[AndyMacAndMic]

Looking at it right now and it’s using 20GB of ram (I have 64). The only applications I have open are Little Snitch and iStat Menu 6.

I picked up my Core i9 2.4 GHZ, 64GB, 4TB SSD with 8500m 8GB on Wednesday the day before Thanksgiving. Everything was working perfectly. Screen looks great and I don’t even have the dreaded popping audio problems.

I have a theory on what’s causing it.

Because I’m a huge idiot and like to fix things that aren’t broken I decided to format the drive completely and reinstall Catalina so I’d have an even purer version (I know I know). That’s where my issue starts. I wanted to be extra secure so I formatted my SSD in APFS-Encrypted and when I finished installing that’s when the problems arose. The speakers are popping whenever I start and stop an audio track. Mind you, this is only in FCPX and not the music app which works fine.

I’ve read that there are some issues with doing an APFS-Encrypted format and I was thinking maybe that’s what’s causing the problem. I think I’m going to format in non encrypted APFS, reinstall and then enable FileVault.

Any idea what might be going on?

Like others already stated:

MacOS claims all the free memory it can get. That means:

• If you almost have no programs running, MacOs claims almost all the free memory.
• If you start programs, MacOs will release the claimed memory to the programs.

This is completely normal behavior. Your theory on what's causing it is wrong because there are no issues at all. This is the way MacOS should handle the memory.

Also the sound popping you here is FCPX related and has nothing to do which the memory handling of MacOS (there are lots of complaints of others too about sound popping in FPCX).