I just got my new mbp 13 inch with 16gigs of RAM. I love it, however I've been watching the activity monitor a lot just to keep track of battery, and I've noticed that the ram usage hasn't dipped below 6gb once the whole time, even when I have no programs running. Does this have something to do with it being new an indexing stuff? Any help would be great, thanks.
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Brand new tb mbp constantly using ~8gb ram?
- Thread starter bedfreed
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Experiencing a similar thing with my nTB MBP 13" with 16gb RAM. From conversations on this forum I was under the impressions that the additional RAM would only be necessary when running intensive programmes eg. Adobe. However I am experiencing the machine regularly using 6gb+ for very low usage (sometimes around the 8-10gb mark.). Makes me wonder what it would of been like if I had not upgraded the RAM.
I previously only had 4gb of RAM in my 2010 MBP and didn't seem to experience a problem except for exceptional circumstances.
It's there, why not use it? macOS manages memory differently depending on space. For instance, it could start dropping pages from executables if you had less memory (since it could load it back from disk if needed). If you have the memory, it can leave those pages in memory. This is separate from swap, btw.
From a memory perspective, unless you start seeing a lot of memory in swap (a GB or more) you don't need to pay attention to memory at all. Even at 1GB swap, you might not see things slow down.
From a memory perspective, unless you start seeing a lot of memory in swap (a GB or more) you don't need to pay attention to memory at all. Even at 1GB swap, you might not see things slow down.
My experience is that when you have more RAM, the computer allows Apps to consume more, since it has has more to allocate. I wouldn't be surprised if some of that is related to background running tasks as well. Right now Chrome is eating a lot of my memory as I probably have 55 tabs open and run about 15 extensions (and have disabled Chrome's own background management setting designed to preserve resources), but if I were to launch a Windows 10 VM that sends 7 GB of RAM to the VM, the RAM utilization of Chrome is reduced.
![Screen Shot 2017-02-01 at 12.54.02 PM.png]( "Screen Shot 2017-02-01 at 12.54.02 PM.png")
macOS will use the extra RAM to keep more things in memory for longer, so that even if applications don't need the 16GB of RAM, that extra RAM is being put to use as a cache. If you run anything that actually needs the extra RAM, it will clear out the cache to make more room. Nothing to worry about.
Dont be too paranoid about it bro..let macOS do its memory management and you focus on your stuff. You should complain if the laptop is getting unreasonably sluggish for no reason/laptop getting too hot/unreasonable battery drain.
Leave the activity monitor alone. Period.
Leave the activity monitor alone. Period.
Modern operating systems will allow applications and services to use memory as then need unless there is a requirement for memory from other applications or services. Then, the amount of memory allocated by a specific application or service is reduced, to ensure all applications or services get a fair share.