Anyone here buy. 15” MacBook Pro and excessive ram usage issues? With only Safari open on an Ultrawide monitor with 3 windows and around 9 tabs open my MacBook Pro is using over 10GB of RAM which I think is crazy too much
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2018 MacBook Pro RAM usage issues
- Thread starter stylinexpat
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It's not easy to explain what all those values actually are, but the gist of it is: don't worry about it if memory pressure is low. Memory is a resource that is best utilized, and modern OSs will try to use as much as they can even when they can (quite easily) shuffle allocation around and give any requesting program what they need.
As the previous poster explained. macOS will try to use as much RAM as possible given available resources.
Take a look at ‘memory pressure.’ You are hardly using any of your available RAM resources, regardless of how much the OS stores in RAM.
Take a look at ‘memory pressure.’ You are hardly using any of your available RAM resources, regardless of how much the OS stores in RAM.
Yes it's fine. macOS will utilise as much RAM as possible to improve system performance. The more RAM you install, the more it will use when idling to ensure it's as buttery as possible. Until it starts paging or memory pressure is high, there's no cause for concern.
This is much better compared to Windows where if you'd double/quadruple your RAM to help with multitasking on applications or loading vast libraries it doesn't seem to make any great difference. Applications on Windows would still frustratingly page to the disk in equal measure as they did before the RAM upgrade.
I remember begging Windows/Cubase to use the 10GB additional RAM I just installed instead of paging to disk when loading VSTs and crippling performance. Boy were those the days. I could never go back to that.
This is much better compared to Windows where if you'd double/quadruple your RAM to help with multitasking on applications or loading vast libraries it doesn't seem to make any great difference. Applications on Windows would still frustratingly page to the disk in equal measure as they did before the RAM upgrade.
I remember begging Windows/Cubase to use the 10GB additional RAM I just installed instead of paging to disk when loading VSTs and crippling performance. Boy were those the days. I could never go back to that.
on my old macbook (2008), i used to disable swap completely while working in logic. Had a couple of glorious crashes when the usage went over.
Yeek that's playing with fire! You're a braver man than I.
I never used LP9 on less than 8GB RAM/7200RPM so I was pretty fortunate with performance and paging wasn't so much an issue on Snow Leopard. Lion was dog crap for memory management though.
You are RAMming it wrong. On my 2011 MBP 15" with 16GB RAM, I can open a seriously large number of tabs without ever entering into swap usage. I'd suggest you take it back to Apple for a full refund and get the 32GB.
But seriously, just enjoy the computer. It depends on a lot of things why you are seeing swap use and the high use of RAM with just 9 tabs. I'd worry a little less, especially with 16GB on hand when I am 'just' browsing.
As you can see, the pressure graph is hovering at somewhere around 25% of the total height it can go to. You are just fine.
This is also why Apple usually used to be a little less about specs, since they wanted people to focus on experience and performance, rather than bother with how much or how little of some component hardware they have.
We have an iPhone 5s running just fine with 1GB of RAM since 2013. No Android can do that. That is because of memory management - not the total amount we have.
Also, check what is eating your memory in the background, there is a chance some software is eating it up.
As noted by others, macOS's memory management is different then windows and free ram is wasted ram. Look at your memory pressure, its very low, so your ram utilization is quite healthy. Wired and swap is excellent as well. If you see excessively high swap being used, that means macOS doesn't have enough memory to keep everything been used in ram, so it swaps it out, and since the swap file is incredibly small you're fine.