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Is this normal memory usage for my 16" M1 Max with upgraded RAM and SSD?

XciteMePls

XciteMePls

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 19, 2013
89
288
Hey guys I have a 16" M1 Max, 32 GPU, 32GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. I am not a graphic designer or music producer or anything of the sort. I'm not a power user. I bought a MacBook Pro because I love Apple products and I can afford to treat myself to a powerful, premium computer that will last a long time (and I'm a console gamer so I don't need/want a gaming PC) so that's why I upgraded the RAM and SSD on this unit.

So far in the past few days just by having Safari open with about 10 tabs (mostly Reddit posts), Apple Music open (but not playing), Photos is open, TopNotch is open and that's basically it, and Activity Monitor is saying I'm using 20GB of RAM! Control Center is taking up 943MB of memory just by itself.

I'm not knowledge about the ins and outs of RAM usage so please tell me, is that normal for such few apps open? I guess I thought 32GB of RAM provided much more headroom than it's showing for my daily usages, unless I'm doing something wrong
 
Last edited:
You're just experiencing MacOS Monterey memory leak, along with a great many other people. So once Apple issues a fix, this should go away. In the meantime, you could check Activity Monitor from time to time, and kill whatever process(es) are consuming ton of RAM.
 
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My memory leak (WindowServer) fixed itself, for now at least, just gradually went away and hasn't come back, yet. Don't know if that's better than stopping it manually.
 
To add: MacOS will use a lot of ram even if your current use case does not need as much. The system will take as much as it can, that’s intended behaviour. But as others have stated, there is also a memory leak going on and it will hopefully be fixed in the coming update. Regarding ram usage: Only worry about it, if you drop into yellow or red graph and experience slowdowns / extreme use of ssd swap.
 
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XciteMePls said:
Hey guys I have a 16" M1 Max, 32 GPU, 32GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. I am not a graphic designer or music producer or anything of the sort. I'm not a power user. I bought a MacBook Pro because I love Apple products and I can afford to treat myself to a powerful, premium computer that will last a long time (and I'm a console gamer so I don't need/want a gaming PC) so that's why I upgraded the RAM and SSD on this unit.

So far in the past few days just by having Safari open with about 10 tabs (mostly Reddit posts), Apple Music open (but not playing), Photos is open, TopNotch is open and that's basically it, and Activity Monitor is saying I'm using 20GB of RAM! Control Center is taking up 943MB of memory just by itself.

I'm not knowledge about the ins and outs of RAM usage so please tell me, is that normal for such few apps open? I guess I thought 32GB of RAM provided much more headroom than it's showing for my daily usages, unless I'm doing something wrong
Click to expand...
That sounds very normal. Reddit is a memory hog; it is not unusual for Reddit to use 500MB per sub/page esp. if you keep scrolling down. Like many others have said, it is just macOS behaviour of maximising RAM usage to improve performance.

In my case, I am doing nothing now and macOS is using 44GB of RAM. However, it is using zero swap and there's no memory pressure, which is again within expectations. (Those "Safari Web Content" processes are Reddit pages.)

Screenshot 2021-11-16 at 8.58.17 PM.png
 
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rich06 said:
This article describes the issue and how to work around until Apple fixes things https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/15/montereys-memory-leak-and-how-to-avoid-it/
Click to expand...
That’s dumb! I haven’t touched those accessibility controls and my Control Center usage ramps up like crazy soon as I start watching Netflix in Safari.
I’ve had Photos go unresponsive due to an out of memory exception once at 115GB. Sounds like a clickbait unless someone actually tried it and it worked.
 
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