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Is this normal memory pressure for an M5 Pro chip?!

xee_ said:
MacBook Pro with an M5-chip and 24GB of RAM. Look at the memory pressure and swap.

A bit disappointed that this is how it performs! Any thoughts? Should I upgrade to 48GB?
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I think you are bragging. Look at everything you have running and it is still responsive. Back in the day, you would have been running one app at a time.

In the meantime, if you do eventually start to slow down, try looking at "Private Memory" in the memory tab of Activity Monitor. If you do have one particular memory hog, it is easier to identify there.
 
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Music, Messages, Edge, plus Android Studio, a text editor, and one Emulator.

About 2 years ago I was using a similar stack (xcode instead of android studio and Spotify instead of Apple music) on an Air with 8gb of RAM. I literally tripled my RAM and have the same memory pressure. The only thing that changed is the OS.

Screenshot 2026-06-22 at 11.10.36 AM.png
 
BSDnostalgia said:
I think you are bragging. Look at everything you have running and it is still responsive. Back in the day, you would have been running one app at a time.

In the meantime, if you do eventually start to slow down, try looking at "Private Memory" in the memory tab of Activity Monitor. If you do have one particular memory hog, it is easier to identify there.
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a decade ago you could run a Linux VM with a full development suite using 4gb of RAM, and have another 4gb of RAM leftover for macOS, iTunes, and whatever else was in vogue. There's something seriously wrong (with apps, the OS, the reporting, I dunno which) that so few apps are taking up so much RAM.
 
xee_ said:
But I am one of those who like peace of mind, especially when I'm using a 2600$ machine.
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My personal peace of mind: If I pay for 24 GB of RAM, I want the computer to use all of it.
If I pay for 48 GB of RAM and see that it's sitting there unused, I'd be upset.

But we think - obviously - different in this regard.
And that's fine. I'm a shareholder too ;-)
 
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donawalt said:
To upgrade just to make memory pressure green, if @xee_ is experiencing no performance/stability problems and this is his regular "workload", is a waste of money imho. I would humbly suggest we wait to hear what @xee_ says about how his Mac is running/performing before suggesting to spend money on a new computer just to turn memory pressure green. If he is having real world problems that's different.

My .02!
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You’re being too logical and practical. Everything in your first post is spot on. But I know you’ve been around MR long enough to realize that 90% or more of “is this enough memory” or “does my memory pressure look off” or the famous “8GB is NOT Pro/your computer will die with 8GB” type posts are never really practical concerns. Yes they may appear so at first and there may be a practical component, but at the end of the day these are psychological not practical concerns. A security blanket may not appear good value on the surface, but if it protects you from the monsters under your bed or in your closet, who’s to say that’s a waste of money when it’s providing the peace of mind OP and countless others on MR desire? Yes I’m being a bit facetious, but these memory threads will go on for pages rehashing the same level-headed advice only for OP to eventually announce they purchased an upgrade. I just hope OP goes 64GB to ensure all future worries are allayed. 😉
 
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NO. Tahoe is absolute garbage. I speak from experience that 24GB on Tahoe is not the same as 24GB on Sequoia.
 
boppin said:
You have too much RAM in your machine when you something look like this:

Only 46% used.
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Now load up a 120 billion parameter 8-bit local LLM model (oss or llama for example) and watch pressure go to 90% and free memory drop to about 8GB. 🙂

Edit: my daily workload with a couple virtual machines and the usual office apps and Teams runs comfortably in 32GB with pressure in the 40% range but I went with 64GB for more flexibility with local LLM and 30 billion parameter 8-bit models like qwen3.6 easily put me in 90% pressure. It’s really just about peace of mind and flexibility for most people choosing larger memory amounts. 90% of daily tasks are handled just fine with 8-16GB if we’re being honest. But there are occasions where the extra memory comes in handy. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it, according to some.
 
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xee_ said:
MacBook Pro with an M5-chip and 24GB of RAM. Look at the memory pressure and swap.

A bit disappointed that this is how it performs! Any thoughts? Should I upgrade to 48GB?

View attachment 2639961
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First off, your processor has nothing to do with memory use.

Second, you aren’t using all available memory. Chrome is the most memory-hungry of browsers so you could always use a more efficient web browser. No matter how much memory or storage you put on a machine, somebody can invent a “need” to use it all up and bring the system to its knees.

To give you some background, the first computer I used was a PDP 11/70 and we were only sometimes permitted to use programs that took up 24 kB of memory.

It’s easy to close and reopen browser tabs if you want more free memory available.
 
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Alameda said:
It’s easy to close and reopen browser tabs if you want more free memory available.
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That's no needed at all. The kernel makes this for you when an application needs or request more RAM. It simply compresses unused or inactive RAM and when this got full it simply uses swap.

Back then in 2016.
512856.png
 
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To OP: I think you should reconsider how you are using the web. Many web pages, even from big names, are not made for long term running in the tabs. Developers expect that you close them from time to time, because the tools they are using to make them are not particularly good at memory management. Some pages even go as far that they just start using your cpu to do the stuff for them. Basically you are renting them your computer resources for free.

It is not normal that web page has more than 2GB of memory use. If it does, and it is not your data, like big project in figma, big data sheet in google doc, or similar..they are simply just bad, and require to close and reopen. If you do plan to use the web as you do now, yes, you need to buy computer with more memory. It might be a mac or PC does not matter.

But realistically do you need to invest more money just to keep tab open always? Isn't cheaper, better solution to close them? Does linkedin.com have 4GB when you close it and open again? Paying more money because of lousy developers leaking memory is just not wise decision.
 
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Charlie Bonesx said:
are you getting beachballs?
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No, but that's also not relevant. I bought 24gb of RAM because I knew that 8gb was my minimum, so 3x should give me plenty of headroom. It's not. The SSD can cover a lot, SSD speeds are actually faster than DDR2 RAM, so beachballs aren't the issue. They never were. It's the fact that I shouldn't need 3x my RAM after a simple OS upgrade.

And as an aside, I have a flaky NAS I've been streaming music off of, and macOS never gives me the beachball of doom anymore, even when the SMB share is flat out gone. So I don't know that the beachball is a reliable indicator of anything, anymore.
 
Man, modern websites are so bad. I just opened LInked.com on my M1 Air 8GB RAM w/ Sequoia and Linkedin shows up immediately as consuming just over 1GB of RAM. I don't view this as a lack of memory problem so much as web page bloat problem. Linkedin should, ideally, cool it with the bloat. Try and avoid using Linkedin or other super bloated websites.

Also, don't try and run all the web pages and all the apps at the same time.

Launch and quit web pages and apps as needed.
 
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capamac said:
Man, modern websites are so bad. I just opened LInked.com on my M1 Air 8GB RAM w/ Sequoia and Linkedin shows up immediately as consuming just over 1GB of RAM. I don't view this as a lack of memory problem so much as web page bloat problem. Linkedin should, ideally, cool it with the bloat. Try and avoid using Linkedin or other super bloated websites.

Also, don't try and run all the web pages and all the apps at the same time.

Launch and quit web pages and apps as needed.
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Someone posted the link a ways back to the story but linkedin is literally linked in to your system, scanning it from head to toe apparently, creating an epic level fingerprint.
 
Check out "Memory Pressure" app by Daniel Ramm Vier on the app store ... very small app (166 kilobytes), sits in the memory bar. Good way to casually monitor your RAM use.
 
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