M1 Air with 16GB of RAM owners - How much swap memory does your Air use?

[Funny Apple Man]

I use FCP with a dozen browser tabs open and no swap memory has been used. I wouldn't worry if it only swaps in a rare occasion.

If your workload involves having the memory swap for most of the time, then yeah I'd upgrade to 16gb of ram.

 

[jav6454]

I have an M1 13" MBP, which I use for work and personal stuff. When Swap is used, it's nothing more than 80MB. I looked online for write capacities of the SSD NAND chips used by Apple and stress tests show that even though these chips rated for 150TB written, they go way into the 300TB range without an issue.

That said, I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[Count Blah]

To be honest, I don't even need to see either memory pressure or swap stats. It just works, as I said, I am not interested even in those stats.

AKA - I don't want to help you? YOU don't need to see, but the OP is looking for additional info.

it's not an affront to Apple for someone to ask specifics, not sure why people take such offense and feel the need to actively/passively put down others.

I'm looking to FINALLY upgrade from an old MBP and I am certainly looking for detailed information, like the OP.

 

[StoneJack]

AKA - I don't want to help you? YOU don't need to see, but the OP is looking for additional info.

it's not an affront to Apple for someone to ask specifics, not sure why people take such offense and feel the need to actively/passively put down others.

I'm looking to FINALLY upgrade from an old MBP and I am certainly looking for detailed information, like the OP.

just choose 16GB if you can afford, or choose 8GB if you want budget edition.
I have 16GB of RAM and this is my memory readings of memory pressure.
I am thinking of buying an older Macbook air, since they are that cheap, and they have mostly 8GB of RAM; I think personally for older models 8GB is fine too.

 

[mabaker]

Is this still an issue with Ventura for anybody?

 

[Mity]

I'm on Ventura and I've seen no difference.

 

[mlody]

About 20+ Safari tabs open, and several other mostly Apple apps like News, Music, Numbers, Weather, Calendar, Notes, Reminders, Messages,Photos etc.

I also occasionally use Skype which is not native Apple Silicon app.

 

[eltoslightfoot]

Mine is similar to @mlody up above. No swap used.

 

[MBAir2010]

I Was wondering if I should get involved here and state
my MacBook Air 2010 original ssd drive is still functional?
and
the MacBook air m1 8GB never suffered any RAM loss or spinning ball
mainly because only  programs and Affinity Design are being used.

hoped this helped and solved any concerns here.

 

[Hammie]

My 2021 14” MBP w/ 16GB has a total of .05 TB of usage on the SSD in about 1 year.

My wife’s M1 MBA w/ 8GB has .07 TB of SSD usage in a little over a year. And she taxes her laptop with 20+ chrome tabs, word, excel, messages, adobe acrobat, preview, and I am sure a few other things. She is back in the school, so no more zoom calls for her students.

Our “spare“ M1 MBA w/ 8GB has .13 TB of SSD usage in about 2 years. ( screen broke during Covid and we had to buy a second laptop since she taugh remotely and needed a device. Now, it is a spare for her)

I have made the decision that I will be selling my MBP and getting an M2 MBA. Still on the fence about 16 versus 24GB of memory. This thread makes me think that I should stay at 16GB and save the $200 USD upgrade. I honestly thought that I was using more Swap. A yearly usage of .07 out of a 150TB estimated lifespan is nothing.

 

[Sowelu]

Funny to have come across this thread as I just noticed that my M2 Air is swapping a bit. I have 24GB of RAM and the Mac has been 'up' for 18 days. Here's the top 10 apps that are using the most memory:

I am not sure how macOS handles memory, but I am assuming that if the pressure is good, there is nothing to be concerned about. I just think it's odd that pressure is normal (or on the low side) yet there is still a bit of swapping going on. But again, I am not an expert in this area.

Also, the SSD is 2TB with 1TB free, so not sure if that comes into play with swapping.

 

[Jack Neill]

M1/16/1TB MBA 13.1

 

[isce]

M1 MBA 16 GB RAM. Use case is typical data science student (manipulating small-medium datasets in RStudio, querying in SQL Server via VMs) and everyday tasks (productivity tools, video conferencing/collaboration, email, YouTube, browsing). Memory pressure is always low - green portion of graph. System usually uses about 9-12 GB RAM at a given time, and virtually never has to swap during practical usage. Only time I've ever observed swap is when I ran a fairly high time complexity code snippet over a large dataset in RStudio and didn't notice it was looping infinitely for about 10 minutes. (The snippet was running some algorithm and storing the results in an ever-expanding dataframe, hence causing the memory spike after x minutes.)

I suppose it's worth mentioning that I'm fairly stringent with my open applications and tabs; they must be *actively* contributing to my workflow. Often I'll only have upwards of 6-8 tabs open maximum at once, and 2-4 applications.

 

[EugW]

M1 Mac mini 16 GB / 1 TB:

Safari x 5 tabs
Mail
iMessage
Citrix Viewer (VPN)
Numbers x 1 spreadsheet
Calendar
Notes

 

[CE3]

If I check Activity Monitor while working in an app like Photoshop (w/ 5-10+ tabs & files open), it’s not uncommon for me to see a few gigabytes of swap being used. This is nothing that noticeably impacts performance for me, and I’m not going to be concerned about the SSD, since I’ve yet to have an issue with one on the Macs I’ve owned.

 

[wilberforce]

If you use Adobe apps like LR and PS, get used to using swap:

Note: LR and PS use significantly more memory on Apple Silicon than on Intel, for the exact same workflow (I have both so can compare). Reason is LR and PS take a large amount of the shared unified memory for their graphical acceleration, which on an Intel machine is done by the separate GPU and its separate vRAM.
I'm not dissatisfied with the performance, but the memory is definitely sometimes under pressure.

 

[wilberforce]

No problem today getting to 25GB swap using PS and LR together:

 

[Swaghetti]

Funny to have come across this thread as I just noticed that my M2 Air is swapping a bit. I have 24GB of RAM and the Mac has been 'up' for 18 days. Here's the top 10 apps that are using the most memory:

View attachment 2135246

I am not sure how macOS handles memory, but I am assuming that if the pressure is good, there is nothing to be concerned about. I just think it's odd that pressure is normal (or on the low side) yet there is still a bit of swapping going on. But again, I am not an expert in this area.

Also, the SSD is 2TB with 1TB free, so not sure if that comes into play with swapping.

Hi,
If I may ask, how many tabs did you open in Chrome? I'm currently debating whether I need 16 GB of RAM or 24 GB of RAM.
My use case would be approximately 50 to 80 Chrome tabs, with a few of them being YouTube videos on the second display, office apps, Steam, and other minor apps in the background. I would maybe play some minor games on Steam. Do you think that I should upgrade to 24 GB of RAM?

 

[EugW]

Hi,
If I may ask, how many tabs did you open in Chrome? I'm currently debating whether I need 16 GB of RAM or 24 GB of RAM.
My use case would be approximately 50 to 80 Chrome tabs, with a few of them being YouTube videos on the second display, office apps, Steam, and other minor apps in the background. I would maybe play some minor games on Steam. Do you think that I should upgrade to 24 GB of RAM?

Holy crap. As much as I think 8 GB is fine for many people, in your case I wouldn’t hesitate to get 24 GB RAM instead of 16 GB.

 

[Sowelu]

Hi,
If I may ask, how many tabs did you open in Chrome? I'm currently debating whether I need 16 GB of RAM or 24 GB of RAM.
My use case would be approximately 50 to 80 Chrome tabs, with a few of them being YouTube videos on the second display, office apps, Steam, and other minor apps in the background. I would maybe play some minor games on Steam. Do you think that I should upgrade to 24 GB of RAM?

Wow, that's a lot of tabs! I would say I had about 20 tabs or so open, but I should also mention that I've not seen another instance of memory swapping since I posted that screen shot, so it might've been an anomaly.

I don't think the swap was due to (just) Chrome, but a combination of things. Also, it's not always the amount of tabs open, but what is displayed in each tab, the content, etc.

I've not restarted in about two weeks, and still no swap used. I would say that 16GB is good for most people, but if you're going to have that many tabs open on a regular basis, I'd go for the 24GB. You can never have too much RAM - macOS will make good use of it.

For me, the weird part was seeing a small swap, but normal memory pressure, so I am thinking it was a bit of a fluke.

 

[Analog Kid]

Run vm_stat and check the swapins and swapouts.

It really doesn't matter how big your swapfile is if it's just sitting there idle. You're probably only looking at one or a few Chrome tabs at any given time. The others are off screen, so the system deprioritizes that data in memory. Eventually it'll get compressed to save space in RAM, then it'll get paged out to disk if the system determines that you're probably not going to access it again for a little while (typically based on the fact that you haven't accessed it for a while). And then it just sits there like a file on disk until you come around to clicking the tab again-- then it'll get paged back in from disk, if that's where it is, then decompressed, then shown all in a fraction of a second.

You're not hurting your SSD if you're clicking between tabs and swapping data in and out. If you're going between the same few tabs, it'll mostly be resident in memory anyway, if you get a cycle of enough tabs that you're rotating through that it forced disk access, then you're pushing a couple hundred MB every few minutes maybe? That's not much traffic for an SSD.

If you don't look at a tab all day, it never swaps again so won't impact anything.

Pretty much nothing you are triggering manually will be a burden on the system-- humans are just too slow.

The time swap becomes an issue for performance if if you're working with a large in-memory dataset and an algorithm needs to access all of it. It'll be very fast if it's all in memory, and will slow significantly if it needs to keep paging data in and out to reference different bits of it. Because it's happening at CPU clock rates, not human response times, it can potentially page much, much more often and generate much more SSD traffic.