Actual RAM use cases

[macintoshmac]

Well, regularly, my 2016 MBP uses swap when Safari is open with about 10 tabs, Outlook and Bear Notes. This notebook is 8GB. Swap usage is usually in some hundred MB to sometimes a little over a gigabyte. Does this mean I would benefit from 16GB?

For this particular reference, my 2011 MBP with 16GB does not use swap at all for exact said use.

 

[davidec]

Working a track in Logic Pro on my MP today and checked activity monitor to see I was using 20Gb of ram due to the sample libraries. Glad I ordered the 32Gb 15”.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

I use mine as a workstation and I can use a Linux VM alongside a Windows 10 VM with spreadsheets and SAP.. On the Linux im doing some CMD stuff.. 8GB more than enough on Mac OS, if it were on Windows it would be choking.

At the end of the day it depends on your usage if u video edit or make music you need 32GB in case of a big project.

For Design and such 16GB is enough for Sketch and Photoshop

 

[Ma2k5]

Working a track in Logic Pro on my MP today and checked activity monitor to see I was using 20Gb of ram due to the sample libraries. Glad I ordered the 32Gb 15”.

The way RAM works, if you had 64GB RAM, your might have been 40GB of RAM (which would make you think 32GB wasn't enough).

Memory swap/pressure data is where you need to look at to see if you are struggling for memory. Computers will naturally use more RAM as there is more RAM.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

The way RAM works, if you had 64GB RAM, your might have been 40GB of RAM (which would make you think 32GB wasn't enough).

Memory swap/pressure data is where you need to look at to see if you are struggling for memory. Computers will naturally use more RAM as there is more RAM.

This.

Memory Pressure is where you really see the RAM Bottleneck, I use 8Gb and mine never goes above 60%

 

[Ma2k5]

I use mine as a workstation and I can use a Linux VM alongside a Windows 10 VM with spreadsheets and SAP.. On the Linux im doing some CMD stuff.. 8GB more than enough on Mac OS, if it were on Windows it would be choking.

At the end of the day it depends on your usage if u video edit or make music you need 32GB in case of a big project.

For Design and such 16GB is enough for Sketch and Photoshop

Honestly, you don't need 32GB RAM for a big music/video project in my opinion - It would be rare to be bottlenecked at 16GB today.

I would still get 32GB but more so for the future, not for today.

 

[Elektrofone]

I use mine as a workstation and I can use a Linux VM alongside a Windows 10 VM with spreadsheets and SAP.. On the Linux im doing some CMD stuff.. 8GB more than enough on Mac OS, if it were on Windows it would be choking.

At the end of the day it depends on your usage if u video edit or make music you need 32GB in case of a big project.

For Design and such 16GB is enough for Sketch and Photoshop

I'm in a weird position because most of the time I'm using sketch and photoshop, however sometimes I do need After Effects or Premiere, but it's more a 70/30 split.

 

[deeddawg]

If you think right now you need 16 GB then later end up needing 32 GB, you can't upgrade it because it's soldered.

If the nature of your work changes so much in two or three years that the lack of 32GB suddenly impedes your ability to function, you most likely will need to upgrade the other aspects such as CPU and storage as well. That means a new machine. Which you'll have more money for then if you don't waste it now on "maybes"...

 

[MacGizmo]

RAM is important in apps like Photoshop that load files into RAM to speed up processing. The more RAM, the larger the image you can load without suffering from slow-downs. A great video card would help, unfortunately Apple uses mobile-class video cards in all Macs other than the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. They're decent cards, but they aren't enough to really power-through massive files the way desktop-class video cards can.

As already stated by others, you can also benefit from more RAM if you have a lot of apps open all the time (particularly web browsers like Chrome that are notorious for memory leaks), including apps that live in the menubar and run in the background (Dropbox, 1Password, etc.).

 

[Ploki]

What application is that you’re using to monitor? Maybe I’ll run that tomorrow during my work day and see how i do.

I have iStat Menus 6
here's a screenshot of last 30 days, on 4th of July i worked on a really large project and it paged 2.3GB to hard drive.
(This is as optimised as it gets, meaning i cut corners in samplers to load as little as possible into ram, which has its own performance implications)
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Working a track in Logic Pro on my MP today and checked activity monitor to see I was using 20Gb of ram due to the sample libraries. Glad I ordered the 32Gb 15”.

you can optimize that greatly in kontakt - memory usage can be cut down to 25% by overwriting default buffer size.
If you have a fast sample drive, this is pretty easy to pull off. (internal SSD of these machines are so fast you don't even need to load samples into ram)

 

[Elektrofone]

I have iStat Menus 6
here's a screenshot of last 30 days, on 4th of July i worked on a really large project and it paged 2.3GB to hard drive.
(This is as optimised as it gets, meaning i cut corners in samplers to load as little as possible into ram, which has its own performance implications)
[doublepost=1532525701][/doublepost]
you can optimize that greatly in kontakt - memory usage can be cut down to 25% by overwriting default buffer size.
If you have a fast sample drive, this is pretty easy to pull off. (internal SSD of these machines are so fast you don't even need to load samples into ram)

Is there a way to log your memory usage over the day so that you don’t have to check it?

 

[Ploki]

Is there a way to log your memory usage over the day so that you don’t have to check it?

iStat Menus 6 logs 30 days of everything so you can just check the graph when you remember it (1 hour, 24hr, 1 week or 1 month view). I've been using it since version 4 and its great.

 

[Elektrofone]

iStat Menus 6 logs 30 days of everything so you can just check the graph when you remember it (1 hour, 24hr, 1 week or 1 month view). I've been using it since version 4 and its great.

Oh great! Going to run it today and see how it fairs.

 

[tomscott1988]

TBH if you can budget for it get 16 in the 13 and get 32 in the 15.

If anything programs will get more ram hungry in the future, by getting more now I wouldn't say its future proofing its more the fact if you buy it now and your needs change in 18 months you dont need to buy a new machine. Its more of a hassle to sell, loose money and reorder than it is spending £200 to double your memory in the 13 and £300 in the 15.

For me its a no brainer because one project would pay for the laptop, if its not a machine you will make money from I would be less inclined. Its easy to get stuck in spec, I would say evaluate your needs and dont overspend if you dont have to.

Like I said I have a base 15 macbook the slowest machine in modern apple history and somehow it more than manages everything from daily tasks and media consumption to also editing 5DMKIV raw files in lightroom...

Lightroom used to pin my mac pro so it shows how HS, Metal and CC updates have improved the UI recently to the point even the most basic machine will give you a good experience for normal tasks.

 

[Elektrofone]

If I notice that Memory Pressure is low (less than 30%) but swap used is upwards of 1GB does that mean that I am running out of memory? I am confused about which is more relevant to my RAM usage.

 

[Ploki]

If I notice that Memory Pressure is low (less than 30%) but swap used is upwards of 1GB does that mean that I am running out of memory? I am confused about which is more relevant to my RAM usage.

I seriously doubt those two happen at the same time (pressure below 30% and swap 1GB +)

running a memory heavy logic project, and pressure is well over 50% while swap is not even 100mb

 

[Polymorphic]

The way RAM works, if you had 64GB RAM, your might have been 40GB of RAM (which would make you think 32GB wasn't enough).

Memory swap/pressure data is where you need to look at to see if you are struggling for memory. Computers will naturally use more RAM as there is more RAM.

The moment he said "sample library" is when your point became moot. I use a lot of sample libraries, and had to to bump my workstation to 64 GB just to be able to use my samples without glitches, dropouts, and clicks. I know guys with larger templates running 128 GB of RAM for the same reason. When you need to play back thousands of voices in realtime, streaming from even the fastest SSDs isn't fast enough. You need that sample data in memory.

 

[Elektrofone]

I seriously doubt those two happen at the same time (pressure below 30% and swap 1GB +)

running a memory heavy logic project, and pressure is well over 50% while swap is not even 100mb

I seriously doubt those two happen at the same time (pressure below 30% and swap 1GB +)

running a memory heavy logic project, and pressure is well over 50% while swap is not even 100mb

Here's a screenshot with a typical After Effects project open. Sketch, Mail, Safari, and Powerpoint are also open.

Maybe it just has to do with After Effects?

 

[Ploki]

Here's a screenshot with a typical After Effects project open. Sketch, Mail, Safari, and Powerpoint are also open.

Maybe it just has to do with After Effects?

oh wow!

Looks like After Effects does memory wildly different.
Right now Logic uses 7.5GB but 6.15 is shown as "wired", while on your screenshot there's much less wired memory (i guess thats why you have lower memory pressure) but much more swap. Which OS version are you running?

 

[Elektrofone]

oh wow!

Looks like After Effects does memory wildly different.
Right now Logic uses 7.5GB but 6.15 is shown as "wired", while on your screenshot there's much less wired memory (i guess thats why you have lower memory pressure) but much more swap. Which OS version are you running?

Running macOS 10.13.6

AE is a strange app. You can set how much RAM is reserved for other applications in the preferences of AE. So it will never completely use up all the available RAM. It will always leave at least 3GB available to the OS and other apps, but I guess it's swapping RAM in that situation. But does that mean I need more RAM? Isn't the SSD fast enough to handle that?

 

[Ploki]

Running macOS 10.13.6

AE is a strange app. You can set how much RAM is reserved for other applications in the preferences of AE. So it will never completely use up all the available RAM. It will always leave at least 3GB available to the OS and other apps, but I guess it's swapping RAM in that situation. But does that mean I need more RAM? Isn't the SSD fast enough to handle that?

it's better than it was swapping to HDD, but swapping is still roughly 10x as slow as memory.

 

[Elektrofone]

it's better than it was swapping to HDD, but swapping is still roughly 10x as slow as memory.

So should I be concerned about the Swap Memory even when the memory pressure is low? I'm not sure I'm grasping how this works.

 

[Ma2k5]

The moment he said "sample library" is when your point became moot. I use a lot of sample libraries, and had to to bump my workstation to 64 GB just to be able to use my samples without glitches, dropouts, and clicks. I know guys with larger templates running 128 GB of RAM for the same reason. When you need to play back thousands of voices in realtime, streaming from even the fastest SSDs isn't fast enough. You need that sample data in memory.

Where your libraries are that large, don't you actually get better performance by using external SSD's to store libraries vs upgrading CPU/RAM etc? The tasks become a lot less CPU intensive right?

 

[Ploki]

The moment he said "sample library" is when your point became moot. I use a lot of sample libraries, and had to to bump my workstation to 64 GB just to be able to use my samples without glitches, dropouts, and clicks. I know guys with larger templates running 128 GB of RAM for the same reason. When you need to play back thousands of voices in realtime, streaming from even the fastest SSDs isn't fast enough. You need that sample data in memory.

That's simply not true, you are grossly over-estimating audio needs.

Lets assume you are running samples at 44100KHz/24bit (Stereo), and sample is ~10 seconds long. That's roughly 2MB of data. If you play 1000 samples in parallel, that's still 2000MB which are read speeds of internal drive of MacBook Pro. (EDIT: Sorry i mistyped. 200mb/s so you could technically play 10000 voices out of internal SSD)

if you run a single nVME SSD dedicated to samples via thunderbolt, it will be enough.
Probably before hitting 1000 samples your kontakt will hit CPU ceiling. (it's roughly 500-600 voices on a Quad Core)


However, you don't play EVERYTHING from disk space (That's why Kontakt has "prebuffer" where it loads attacks to memory and streams other stuff from drives, so called DFD)

edit2:
Just to be exact, 44.1k/24 audio stream is 0,13MB/s

edit3:
running 128GB RAM for sample libraries means you have no clue how to manage resource on a computer and means you have too much money to throw away. People like that usually run SATA3 SSDs or some other old obsolete tech.

Where your libraries are that large, don't you actually get better performance by using external SSD's to store libraries vs upgrading CPU/RAM etc? The tasks become a lot less CPU intensive right?

yeah, but there's no sense in discussing with music guys, they're the most clueless of the bunch technically and can't get over the fact that audio doesn't need a fraction of the processing power that video does... I should know, I am one.
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So should I be concerned about the Swap Memory even when the memory pressure is low? I'm not sure I'm grasping how this works.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464#memory

If i recall correctly, in general if memory pressure is in the green, you're good to go. But I'm used to swap = bad, so if i see im hitting it way too hard i'm always considering memory upgrade

 

[aevan]

The big reason for the "16GB is not enough" line of thought is that the RAM is soldered on. So, yes, if your needs should require greater than 16GB down the road and do not buy 32GB, yeah, hosed.

If you don’t need 32Gb RAM currently, you’re not going to need it before the whole computer is outdated.
[doublepost=1532532956][/doublepost]

Well, regularly, my 2016 MBP uses swap when Safari is open with about 10 tabs, Outlook and Bear Notes. This notebook is 8GB. Swap usage is usually in some hundred MB to sometimes a little over a gigabyte. Does this mean I would benefit from 16GB?

You’re not going to notice any perceptible difference for those tasks with 16Gb. Swap file size differs, but not because the RAM is full, it’s more complicated than that. The only thing you need to monitor is memory pressure being green.