16” Ram advice

[JPizzzle]

Hey all,

I recently bought a 16” MBP with 64gb of ram and am noticing that in activity monitor my memory used is typically in the mid to high 20’s and my pressure is always green. If I drop down to the 32gb, would it be safe to assume that my pressure should stay in the green for most things?

I likely don’t fully understand the relationship between memory used and memory pressure. Haha

 

[velocityg4]

If you just got it and are in the mid to high 20's. I would not drop down to 32GB. As the memory requirements of software tends to increase as it is updated. You could very easily slip into the mid 30's in a year or two. Which would mean for a slow computer.

 

[JPizzzle]

If you just got it and are in the mid to high 20's. I would not drop down to 32GB. As the memory requirements of software tends to increase as it is updated. You could very easily slip into the mid 30's in a year or two. Which would mean for a slow computer.

thanks, I am debating dropping to 32 and picking up the 5600M for some gaming. The drop would help off set the costs. Also I should admit I’ll likely upgrade when mini-led comes out. I got this with a Apple employee friend discount so I hope to not take too bad of a resale hit (15% off)

 

[ctjack]

Definitely you will be fine with 32Gb. 5600m has more value in my opinion.

 

[Supra Mac]

Here you go buddy. Hope this helps, you will be fine.

Apple Memory Pressure

 

[LFC2020]

64gb of ram

😱😍😱😍

Save your money drop to 32 gig.

64 gig does look nice though. 😂

 

[leman]

I recently bought a 16” MBP with 64gb of ram and am noticing that in activity monitor my memory used is typically in the mid to high 20’s and my pressure is always green. If I drop down to the 32gb, would it be safe to assume that my pressure should stay in the green for most things?

If you drop down to 16GB your pressure will stay green...

 

[JPizzzle]

Thanks guys. I’m trying to understand memory used vs memory pressure. It would be easy to look at it as memory used is how much you need, but I know that’s not the case.
Also, I’m the type of person who has a bunch of tabs and programs open, does Lightroom/photoshop, a single VM usually. I know I can easily close apps, but don’t care to haha
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Here you go buddy. Hope this helps, you will be fine.

Apple Memory Pressure

thanks. I saw that breakdown. I was just trying to see at what point does memory pressure start to rise. If I drop to 32 and fill my memory used, Will the pressure then rise?
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If you drop down to 16GB your pressure will stay green...

Thats re-assuring. What are you basing that on?

 

[chabig]

I recently bought a 16” MBP with 64gb of ram and am noticing that in activity monitor my memory used is typically in the mid to high 20’s and my pressure is always green. If I drop down to the 32gb, would it be safe to assume that my pressure should stay in the green for most things?

Yes of course. 32GB is a lot of RAM. Your memory pressure would still be green with 16GB and very likely even with 8GB. Memory used has little to do with memory pressure, because the operating will always to take advantage of whatever RAM you give it.

 

[leman]

Thats re-assuring. What are you basing that on?

Years of experience

On a more serious note, since you are saying that with 64GB physical RAM your average ram utilization is around 25GB, I would assume that you are not doing anything that can be considered RAM intensive. My guess is that more than half of this RAM is occupied by things that you don't actively need — but the OS does not purge it because there is not much point — after all, you have more then enough space to be used speculatively.

For modern everyday computing (home+office work), 8GB is ok, 16GB is plenty. People who might need 32GB are pros working with "hungry" software, where you have large datasets that need to be available on a short notice. 64Gb... my personal opinion is that it's pretty much useless on a consumer CPU with dual channel memory. It can't utilize this much RAM efficiently, so you end up using it as glorified, expensive and battery-sucking cache. For workflows that truly need that much RAM, you also probably need one of the 16+ core CPUs with multiple memory channels. Then again, I am sure that some people with very niche applications do have a use for it on a laptop.

My other very personal opinion is that Apple's move to introduce 64GB in the 16" was pure genius. It is great publicity aka "look, we do care about pros after all" (whatever that means) but more importantly, it is a real gold mine for Apple because people tend to overestimate their need. Even I bit in and got 32GB RAM for my 16" (but then again, company pays, and I do work with very large datasets occasionally and having this much RAM means that I can get away with lazy coding).

 

[maerz001]

If you just got it and are in the mid to high 20's. I would not drop down to 32GB. As the memory requirements of software tends to increase as it is updated. You could very easily slip into the mid 30's in a year or two. Which would mean for a slow computer.

Is this sarcasm? Why do you think his ram use would easily increase by 50% in a year???

 

[velocityg4]

Is this sarcasm? Why do you think his ram use would easily increase by 50% in a year???

I was looking at the high 20's figure posted. Jumping from say 29GB to 35GB. That's only a 20% increase in memory usage. Which isn't a big jump for somebody already using that much RAM. Especially when there is already presumably a three to five GB swing in normal usage. With only three GB to spare at times though. Usage possibly only needs to increase 10% before they may start seeing yellow memory pressure. Getting some slowdowns

By downgrading from 64GB to 32GB. That means they'd be using 70% to 90% of RAM resources out the gate when usage is in the mid to high 20's. As I'd expect someone to want at least three but more likely at least five years out of a system. Going in that close to the mark is not advisable.

Of course I was just taking at face value that the op is actively using that much RAM for a pro workflow. Given they bought a 16" Macbook Pro with 64GB RAM. It's now only apparent from latter posts that the Op isn't using that much RAM actively and just leaving everything open.

 

[Egregio]

Close the tabs and programs you don't use, you lazybones.

 

[leman]

In addendum to my previous post... I have a 32GB RAM machine. My activity monitor tells me that around 14GB is used. But RAM usage figures like that are misleading. Memory management is complicated. If you want to know the real story, run vm_stat in terminal. Here is my output:

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free:                             5037986.
Pages active:                            692710.
Pages inactive:                          517411.
Pages speculative:                       170655.
Pages throttled:                              0.
Pages wired down:                       1059250.
Pages purgeable:                         103287.
"Translation faults":                 364549965.
Pages copy-on-write:                   32137712.
Pages zero filled:                    207605660.
Pages reactivated:                      1291175.
Pages purged:                           1786586.
File-backed pages:                       379257.
Anonymous pages:                        1001519.
Pages stored in compressor:             4466825.
Pages occupied by compressor:            909627.
Decompressions:                         5223109.
Compressions:                          11739615.
Pageins:                                8514093.
Pageouts:                                 18383.
Swapins:                                8094925.
Swapouts:                               9222849.

The "real" occupied RAM is active (stuff currently allocated by running applications) and wired (mision-critical kernel memory). In total I have 1751960 such memory pages (4KB each). This is just under 7GB. And I have around 50 tabs open in Safari, Xcode + 3 coding editors open, Steam, Keynote, Mail, Calendar, two different R-Studio sessions, Notes, iTunes, Numbers, Zoom, and 20+ open PDFs in Preview....

Note also that there are almost as many inactive pages than there are active! Inactive memory is memory that has been freed by applications, but OS decided not to purge it "just in case" (e.g. maybe you re going to start the same app again soon, then macOS won't need to reload it from disk). Also, just under 1GB is "speculative" — OS deciding to preload frequency used apps etc. in case I would want to use them. This is just after wake up btw, inactive and speculative pages tend to grow if your machine is awake for a while. Thats where your RAM is going if you have plenty of it and that is what people mean by "macOS tries to utilize the RAM you have". RAM usage figures are mostly meaningless. Memory pressure is the most useful statistic for a consumer.


So yeah, RAM management is hard. You need to understand how OS operates to understand how RAM is used.
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Close the tabs and programs you don't use, you lazybones.

You don't even need to do this. The OS is very good at detecting what you don't use and will compress/purge/offload these things. You probably won't even notice anything. Maybe some minor delay when switching to a tab you haven't used in a while. But then again, the switching animation takes longer than to reload the data from the SSD.

 

[JPizzzle]

So to sum up, you guys are saying I wouldn't notice any performance difference with my current setup if I drop down to 32. This also includes not really having to close apps to maintain performance (reasonably).

 

[DeltaMac]

If you have a lot of inactive apps (open, but not in use at the moment) and another, active app needs more RAM for (whatever), your macOS system will re-allocate memory where it is needed. Should you then use an inactive app, the system will then move memory for that use, too.
All of that memory activity is not likely to result in much that you might notice -- unless your are REALLY low on RAM, such as the iMac that I was trying to "tune up" that only had 2 GB total installed. Now, THAT system was mostly unusable. Customer was trying to upgrade to El Capitan from Mavericks, and couldn't figure out why everything was ultra slow response. Glad I could talk him into adding more RAM. Amazing what going to 16GB did. Well, the SSD that he wanted helped a little, too

 

[chabig]

So to sum up, you guys are saying I wouldn't notice any performance difference with my current setup if I drop down to 32. This also includes not really having to close apps to maintain performance (reasonably).

Yes. That’s right. RAM has very little impact on performance on modern operating systems with SSDs. The CPU and GPU play far more important roles.