So Im sitting here wondering if I should have gone for 16GB of RAM... My current MBP has 8GB and ive been watching the usage of it over the last couple days and its been using 3/4 of it consistently. I dont really want to bump my order back but I dont want to get into a situation where I wish I had done it. Anyone got some insight? I plan to keep this computer for 6ish years.
Edit to add that most of the usage is cached data in RAM.
Quoting- page 49 of this thread #1211:
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I'm a web developer for my profession, I spend all day coding modern websites
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This must be a Mac-only thing, I have a tank of a gaming PC and I've never come close to using my 8GB of RAM. Not to put Mac's down of course, I'm buying one, it just might need a bit more understanding on my part that's all.
Hehe, me too. I do Ruby on Rails and PHP.
You have to consider that Mac uses RAM similar to Linux, and not Windows. The kernel and memory management strategy is different. Most kernel and software development at memory management level tend to be more or less agressive depending on availability of Resources.
If I had 4GB of RAM, would I still be able to do all the things I do? Yep, I did it with a 2008 MBP and 4GB of RAM until 2014.
Mac/Linux also marked RAM up differently. Windows usually only display the active memory, not what the software and kernel used/cached before. On Mac/Linux the strategy is more like, don't unload it unless we run out. So when we say things like using 30/32GB of RAM, that represent a hardline of all our software running and never exceeded that amount, no garbage collection or unloading is called or needed. When unloading happens, it only does so for a segment of least used cache, so you'd still see something like 32/32GB used. In my post, 7GB was cached. The rest probably on a very lazy management strategy where stuff really aren't unloaded.
The speed difference is managing all that memory pruning make your Windows or Ultrabook ever so slightly slower, jsut by maybe a few hundred ms or a few seconds per day. Not humanly noticable, but there is a cost to aggressive memory management."
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In 9 for 10 situations you don't need 16 mb in macOS - it's not windows and memory management is different = efficient (see bold text above for explanation). I'm doing heavy stuff and almost never have macOS forced to page memory - OS X Mavericks introduced memory packing and other optimization tricks.
