Actual RAM use cases

[bobbie424242]

<sarcasm>
It doesn't matter that people buy 32 GB machine, 16 of which they will never use. It makes people feel good and confident ! I have 32 GB of RAM like a pro ! I can run multiple VMs !
And with the i9 throttling issue, people discovered they needed desktop level CPU power and insta developped an urge for video encoding and long running heavy CPU tasks. That's cute ! But this idylic vision could one day be anihilated by a swollen battery destroying such beautiful and tight hardware...
</sarcasm>

 

[Ploki]

<sarcasm>
It doesn't matter that people buy 32 GB machine, 16 of which they will never use. It makes people feel good and confident ! I have 32 GB of RAM like a pro ! I can run multiple VMs !
And with the i9 throttling issue, people discovered they needed desktop level CPU power and insta developped an urge for video encoding and long running heavy CPU tasks. That's cute !
</sarcasm>

Ugh, even the i5 chips throttled... the i9 only exhibited the worst case of symptoms.
And the point was not that they needed desktop performance, but that the laptop didnt deliver what it advertised.

 

[Elektrofone]

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.




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.
[doublepost=1532532664][/doublepost]
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

Well in that case the highest my memory pressure ever gets is 37%. I'm trying to think of situations where I'd need more, but I just can't think of any.

 

[Ploki]

Well in that case the highest my memory pressure ever gets is 37%. I'm trying to think of situations where I'd need more, but I just can't think of any.

Yeah, with faster drives and everything, it's really debatable. On my 2012 rMBP for the workflow i have, SSD speeds is a bottle neck (As in, "it could work faster") and CPU hits the ceiling.
Can't say i once said "huh i need more RAM". I'm gonna get it anyway.

 

[macintoshmac]

If you don’t need 32Gb RAM currently, you’re not going to need it before the whole computer is outdated.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

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.

I saw it going into yellow only for the first time in my history with the Mac, and that was because of Photos downloading in the background. This seems to be some bug, there is a thread in the forum somewhere for it.

I thought so too, that as long as the memory pressure remains green I am good to go without worry. I am always in the green, even if the swap is over a gigabyte. Only thing that made me think of it as the RAM is that my 16GB MBP 2011 does not go into swap use at all in this use case.

 

[Qaulity]

Yeah, with faster drives and everything, it's really debatable. On my 2012 rMBP for the workflow i have, SSD speeds is a bottle neck (As in, "it could work faster") and CPU hits the ceiling.
Can't say i once said "huh i need more RAM". I'm gonna get it anyway.

Well, DDR4 ram can transfer data between 17GB/s and 26GB/s depending on frequency. 3GB/s isn't even close to managing that. Honestly though, I can't think of anything done on a laptop that would require the entire volume of ram to be transferred every second. The entire 4TB hard drive could be written and dumped from RAM every 2.5 minutes or so. These notebooks aren't designed to be part of some render farm or data analysis farm. They're meant to be portable and offer enough speed to where the slowest thing in the process is the user, have we gotten there yet? I don't know.

Needing to make 4K and 8K youtube videos seems kinda niche and not particularly valuable to most people. Folks that make 8K videos for clients are probably using a dual/quad CPU workstation desktop with linux and banging out renders in no time flat. Even Disney uses big server render farms for their movies, so you don't necessary need anything special since everything is off loaded to the server. Then theres the rest of us who say we need a $5000 laptop with 6 cores and 32GB of RAM, and I think that's who Apple is marketing to.

 

[wallysb01]

What is real purpose of threads like this? Does average joe-shmoe editing photos in his spare time need >16GB, probably not. And unless you step that up substantially, you don't need to "future proof" your machine either. But those of us that really need it, need it.

Here's a couple of images when I starting running analysis on two projects at once. As you can see, there isn't much head room here and these are two pretty modestly sized projects these days.

The thing is, show me an Application which requires more than 16GB of base memory in order to function, or even 8GB for that matter. Having more RAM is not a requirement to use the computer, and in most cases will make very little difference to the operation of the computer - unless you find currently that you're hitting that limit frequently.

With swapping, few applications "require" a certain amount of RAM, but many I work with will detect the amount of RAM that is free and if it isn't enough to load the required data, it quits. Even really fast swapping, like these ~2GB/sec SSDs, is a hell of a lot slower than DDR4 RAM, which I believe is around 30 GB/sec.

 

[Elektrofone]

I just did a pretty intensive render in AE; about as crazy as I'd ever get and these were the results. Do you guys think I need more RAM?

Swap Memory

Memory Usage

Memory Pressure

 

[deeddawg]

And unless you step that up substantially, you don't need to "future proof" your machine either. But those of us that really need it, need it.

Indeed, there certainly are use cases where it's needed. I'd also reiterate that most folks who truly would benefit from 32GB RAM already know it and aren't asking a forum.

 

[Elektrofone]

Indeed, there certainly are use cases where it's needed. I'd also reiterate that most folks who truly would benefit from 32GB RAM already know it and aren't asking a forum.

How would you know though. What kind of symptoms would your computer exhibit to warrant needing more RAM?

 

[travod]

I don't do anything intensive on my laptop, but leaving tabs open in two browsers, a Twitch stream or two, and Discord in the background pushes me to just under 8 GB. So I'm going with 16 because why not?

 

[wallysb01]

How would you know though. What kind of symptoms would your computer exhibit to warrant needing more RAM?

Possible symptoms of insufficient RAM include:
Crashing applications. CPU utilization dropping towards zero even though a job is running. Beach balls. Frustration induced loss of hair.

If you have a job running and you can do something like open a new webpage smoothly, you don't have a RAM problem.

 

[Qaulity]

Possible symptoms of insufficient RAM include:
Crashing applications. CPU utilization dropping towards zero even though a job is running. Beach balls. Frustration induced loss of hair.

If you have a job running and you can do something like open a new webpage smoothly, you don't have a RAM problem.

macOS will tell you your system has run out of memory and open a prompt to close applications as well.

 

[deeddawg]

I don't do anything intensive on my laptop, but leaving tabs open in two browsers, a Twitch stream or two, and Discord in the background pushes me to just under 8 GB. So I'm going with 16 because why not?

While 8GB is serviceable for many workloads, I would agree that going to 16MB is generally going to be a good choice for a new system purchase today.

How would you know though. What kind of symptoms would your computer exhibit to warrant needing more RAM?

Answered a couple times already. Check your memory pressure / usage.

I’m barely even registering more than 12GB used, but I always wonder if more RAM were available would the system perform better and if I am bottlenecking myself because of the lack of RAM.

Bottlenecks are constraints where insufficient capacity is limiting performance. By definition, if you're *not* using the entire capacity and thus aren't limiting your performance, there's not a bottleneck.

Having a 32 seat dining room table instead of a 16 seat dining room table really doesn't give any benefit if you never invite over more than 12 people.

Everything I read says the more RAM you give After Effects the better, but in my usage I only notice a benefit in RAM preview times and it has little effect when it comes to render times.

Makes sense. Some applications will use extra memory to pre-cache stuff from disk. Sounds like you're seeing that effect with preview times. The question then would be whether extending that by another 16GB would make enough of a real difference in your usage to justify the additional expense.

 

[SoApple]

I’m pursuing an undergrad in comp sci in september. I purchased a 2017 tb mbp but ended up returning it. I didn’t like the touchbar that much. Problem is, I still need a computer.

Do you guys think the dual core 2017 ntb is still worth it? As far as ram goes, is 16gb for a comp sci student?

 

[Elektrofone]

While 8GB is serviceable for many workloads, I would agree that going to 16MB is generally going to be a good choice for a new system purchase today.


Answered a couple times already. Check your memory pressure / usage.


Bottlenecks are constraints where insufficient capacity is limiting performance. By definition, if you're *not* using the entire capacity and thus aren't limiting your performance, there's not a bottleneck.

Having a 32 seat dining room table instead of a 16 seat dining room table really doesn't give any benefit if you never invite over more than 12 people.


Makes sense. Some applications will use extra memory to pre-cache stuff from disk. Sounds like you're seeing that effect with preview times. The question then would be whether extending that by another 16GB would make enough of a real difference in your usage to justify the additional expense.

I guess I'm just confused because I am doing a very complicated render in After Effects and Premiere with both applications open and it still only says my pressure is at 26% but other folks are saying that their RAM usage pegs with things like Warp Stabilizer. I just don't understand how they're maxing it out.

 

[Aea]

I’m pursuing an undergrad in comp sci in september. I purchased a 2017 tb mbp but ended up returning it. I didn’t like the touchbar that much. Problem is, I still need a computer.

Do you guys think the dual core 2017 ntb is still worth it? As far as ram goes, is 16gb for a comp sci student?

I've been working professionally (Software Engineer) for a decade with 16GB of ram. You're going to be just fine.

 

[jerryk]

I’m pursuing an undergrad in comp sci in september. I purchased a 2017 tb mbp but ended up returning it. I didn’t like the touchbar that much. Problem is, I still need a computer.

Do you guys think the dual core 2017 ntb is still worth it? As far as ram goes, is 16gb for a comp sci student?

What is it about the touchbar that bothers you? To me the Touchbar is a Meh feature. It is just sort of there. I hate that there is no physical Escape key, but have quit using most vi editors, so the lack of physical Esc is not as critical as it was 2 or 3 years ago.

And 16 GB is likely much better for a CompSci student. Especially if you need to build ML Models, run services, etc. as part of your program.

 

[Aea]

vi and bash / zsh / your choice of shell are very much dependent on using the esc key often. I find vi (or terminal-based text editors) inescapable in this line of work.

 

[SoApple]

What is it about the touchbar that bothers you? To me the Touchbar is a Meh feature. It is just sort of there. I hate that there is no physical Escape key, but have quit using most vi editors, so the lack of physical Esc is not as critical as it was 2 or 3 years ago.

And 16 GB is likely much better for a CompSci student. Especially if you need to build ML Models, run services, etc. as part of your program.

I hit the escape key a lot and I didn’t find any use for it. I read (only after returning it) that better touch tool made it much better.

Also, is there going to be a massive difference between the dual and quad core i5?

 

[macintoshmac]

I hit the escape key a lot and I didn’t find any use for it. I read (only after returning it) that better touch tool made it much better.

Also, is there going to be a massive difference between the dual and quad core i5?

Two physical cores extra usually make for a lot of difference in apps that do better with multithreading.

 

[Polymorphic]

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.




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.
[doublepost=1532532664][/doublepost]
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

You should get outside your own context more, Ploki. Your arrogance does your argument no favors. I'm a software developer by profession. But I've known "music guys" who are far smarter than I am.

In your cherry-picked scenario, a single NVMe SSD might be enough. But 1,000 samples isn't an especially high number in certain use cases. For an entire orchestra, try 3,000-5,000 simultaneous voices. Then add continuous cross-fading between samples. The difference in latency between RAM and NVMe storage at low buffers starts to become obvious. And problematic.

If these workloads were as trivial as you suggest, products like Vienna Ensemble Pro and Bidule wouldn't exist. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a working composer in Hollywood who isn't using one of them, usually hosting hundreds or even thousands of Kontakt instances across multiple servers.

 

[BigMcGuire]

(I realize this is a generic post without exact sizes / numbers - apologies).

I'm probably a medium user on my MBP 13' 2017. I did shell out $ for 16GB of ram but because I plan on keeping this machine for 6+ years. My MBA 11' 2015 had 4GB of ram and I never got it to yellow with my usage. My Mac Mini 2011 had 8GB of ram and, same, even with tons of stuff opened, never got to yellow or red - even with Starcraft running.

The cached ram seems to vary, I've noticed gigs and gigs of stuff there even with light usage. My MBP 2017 always has gigs used and gigs cached it seems - but the "pressure?" graph is like 10%. I maybe got it to 30% with a ton of stuff opened intentionally.

The most ram I saw used was when I was using Adobe Lightroom to work on some 150GB of photos and videos. I wish I had taken pictures but even then it didn't get above 60%.

Has me convinced this laptop should easily last me, with my usage, for 10 years. I'd be happy with 8GB of ram if I had to.

 

[jerryk]

Also, is there going to be a massive difference between the dual and quad core i5?

If you read the benchmark numbers there is quite a bit of difference between the old dual cores in the non-touchbar systems and the new quad core processor touchbar models. More than twice on multi-core benchmarks.

You might considered getting a refurbished 2017 non-touchbar if you are going that way. Those should be covered for 4 years on the keyboard because of the Apple program.

 

[Ploki]

You should get outside your own context more, Ploki. Your arrogance does your argument no favors. I'm a software developer by profession. But I've known "music guys" who are far smarter than I am.

In your cherry-picked scenario, a single NVMe SSD might be enough. But 1,000 samples isn't an especially high number in certain use cases. For an entire orchestra, try 3,000-5,000 simultaneous voices. Then add continuous cross-fading between samples. The difference in latency between RAM and NVMe storage at low buffers starts to become obvious. And problematic.

If these workloads were as trivial as you suggest, products like Vienna Ensemble Pro and Bidule wouldn't exist. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a working composer in Hollywood who isn't using one of them, usually hosting hundreds or even thousands of Kontakt instances across multiple servers.

Well, we were discussing in context of MacBook Pro and RAM, which makes your case the same as comparing an iMac Pro for video to a 60-machine render farm.

I'll reiterate, by the time you get to 3000-5000 voices CPU is long overtasked on a MacBook Pro. (probably 2000-4000 voices over tasked).

5000 simultaneous voices? Even if you divide orchestra into *every single instrument* and layer it 4 times, you're nowhere near that number. Every legato patch cuts and crossfades, and you have sections usually, not every single instrument separately (because it makes no sense). If someone needs 5000 stereo voices simultaneously, they maybe need to rethink their approach to orchestration, and "killing voices" is a thing (especially when the voices are way too below threshold to be heard over the newly played sample)

I know a composer working in Hollywood, and the workflows are vastly different. Crazy amount of RAM was very common a couple of years ago when disks were slow and fast disks were expensive. But audio needs didn't increase all that much, and disks got crazy fast in the last few years.

What does VSE or Bidule has to do with trivial or not? It's a sample management/chaining tool. RAM usage in NI Kontakt (which is still one of the best sampler engines) is extremely different whether you set prebuffer to 16KB or 60KB (as it is default)

Most composers have all samples loaded to begin with (even if they dont use them), but with fast disks speeds. nVME SSD Latency is in microseconds, audio latency in such a system is never that low (because its not even possible).

And samples are streamed from disk. If you have 3 orchestras loaded thats usually 350GB of data, so there's no way everything fits into RAM (i.e. a single piano is 50GB, and thats conservative, some are even 120GB). How much you fit into ram and how much you stream from disk depends wholly on your drive's performance... And as drive speeds increase, need for RAM decreases in audio.

So this is where you were wrong initially. Not only that you don't NEED all that sample data in RAM, you never even have it because its inefficient and nearly impossible for huge templates.