Yep. As I said, my actually cooked itself to death. A shame as it was an excellent computer and far quicker than my old 2012 Mac Pro.
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Mac Mini m2 Pro - 16GB vs 32GB
- Thread starter icemantx
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I multitask a lot! Usual things: email, web browsing, watching YouTube videos and music (many open tabs in the navigator), music playing in the background, pictures/photos classifications and editing with Pixelmator Pro, watching movies/series (mostly 2k or 4k MKV files), and then some more serious work: LaTeX compilations, Mathematica calculations/compilations. Trying some recent games, probably.
I don't do movies editing, or any 3d modelling/animations (except with Mathematica). I don't do music composition neither.
After almost a month my 16gb ram m2 pro Mac mini says 930mb swap memory in activity monitor
Does this mean I made a mistake getting 16gb ram over 32?
Or this normal
Does this mean I made a mistake getting 16gb ram over 32?
Or this normal
I consider that minimal swap over the course of a month. Today I had almost 4GB swap on my 16GB M1 MBA.
How was the memory pressure? Any yellow, or all green all the time?
Using swap is perfectly normal in a modern OS. It’s nothing to worry about. The issue occurs if you have (not enough RAM) and you run (applications that need a lot more RAM than you have) and then they’ll swap a lot.
If you’re interested, you can monitor this. IStat Menus 6 shows a pretty good, simple representation of MB/s of swap activity; if you have a lot of it (constant MB/s of swap going on, all the time, while running apps) then you perhaps could justify a model with more RAM.
If this is just a generic “Oh, you’re using a 4GB swap file”, then that’s a nonissue. It also doesn’t really give you enough information (you need the amount of usage that swap is getting expressed as a rate) to make a decision one way or another.
In other words, in plain terms, having a swap, and using it, isn’t bad, and allows your Mac to run more apps that it otherwise would be able to with very little impact to you.
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Thought I'd add my brief experience. When going from my 2018 i7 16GB Mac mini to an M2 Pro mini 16GB, I had way more frequent yellow memory pressure (never have it on my Intel mini), but no swap was used. Perhaps AS Macs more aggressively keep as much in memory as possible before using swap? It was my first AS Mac and I have since returned it, but I don't think the machine slowed down at all despite showing yellow pressure.
One small issue I have from time to time on my 2018 mini (not sure what causes it) is that the machine never clears the swap. So I can have no or few programmes open and I will still have 7-9GB swap used, and I have to restart the computer. It never used to happen, so I assume it is a bug introduced in one of the last two Mac OS releases (alongside many others...)
Considering the only way you knew it had used swap files was to literally go and find out that information is a pretty solid indication you were clueless to it happening.
I'd say you are safe with 16GB.
But aside from looking in AM for the “problem”, was there any other manifestation of an issue?
Having swap is normal. Were you paging excessively to/from it?
In other words, was there anything actually wrong with the machine?
All of this sounds like “Mac behaving as designed” to me…
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If you’re really into the recent AS games, like RE:Village or Baldur’s Gate 3, or Disco Emporium, the M2 Pro’s GPU is a significant step above the M2 mini’s GPU. That plus the doubling of memory speed (for the GPU…) helps graphics performance quite a bit.
The rest isn’t going to stretch even a basic AS machine.
My 2018 mini usually sits at 1-2GB swap. Having 7-9GB is abnormal and causes the machine to slow down, even if I have just Safari open with one tab. It's certainly not normal behaviour if I look back at the last decade of using a Mac. I don't have a clue what is causing it. I am a pretty light user so it does seem a bit excessive for the programmes I use. Anyway, it doesn't happen too often thankfully.But aside from looking in AM for the “problem”, was there any other manifestation of an issue?
Having swap is normal. Were you paging excessively to/from it?
In other words, was there anything actually wrong with the machine?
All of this sounds like “Mac behaving as designed” to me…
One thing I’d like to reiterate:
Seeing swap is not a problem. Seeing swap doesn’t mean “Oh, I should have bought more RAM!”.
Unless money grows on trees near you, there’s no reason to fear swap or to focus on eliminating it.
Swap allows you to run more apps than you otherwise would be able to, by allowing the OS to offload unused or less-used portions of applications (not even the whole thing!) onto the swap, rather than keeping it in RAM.
This is completely normal, not to be feared, and not indicative of a problem! All modern OSs work exactly this same way, and just seeing swap (or seeing 4GB in use, or whatever amount) is not a problem. It is an indication the system is working as designed.
Excessive swap use might look like constantly, minute in and minute out, hitting that swap file. But given that’s exactly what you want when you’re using your system heavily, even that’s hard to get excited about unless you see a negative performance implication.
And just seeing a bit of red in Activity Monitor does not necessitate a performance implication.
If you can see slowdown, and if you can see a negative impact, then sure, that’s a reason to get more RAM.
Rather than worrying about how much swap is in use, the figure I think you should be looking for is the amount of paging to disk in MB/s that is happening, as that will indicate actual use (demand) on the swap file.
Speaking of negative performance implication, on my 2018 MM i7, 32GB ram, after I use Lightroom or Capture One for some time, (editing photos, exporting etc) I noticed the program started to lag badly (slider response, overall sluggish).One thing I’d like to reiterate:
Seeing swap is not a problem. Seeing swap doesn’t mean “Oh, I should have bought more RAM!”.
Unless money grows on trees near you, there’s no reason to fear swap or to focus on eliminating it.
Swap allows you to run more apps than you otherwise would be able to, by allowing the OS to offload unused or less-used portions of applications (not even the whole thing!) onto the swap, rather than keeping it in RAM.
This is completely normal, not to be feared, and not indicative of a problem! All modern OSs work exactly this same way, and just seeing swap (or seeing 4GB in use, or whatever amount) is not a problem. It is an indication the system is working as designed.
Excessive swap use might look like constantly, minute in and minute out, hitting that swap file. But given that’s exactly what you want when you’re using your system heavily, even that’s hard to get excited about unless you see a negative performance implication.
And just seeing a bit of red in Activity Monitor does not necessitate a performance implication.
I took a look at my ram and it's still in the green zone with the "Memory Used" nowhere near 32GB, so I'm wondering what may be the cause.
Can I safely say that this has nothing to do with the ram and maybe more to do with the gpu/cpu?😆
I wouldn’t assume a cpu or gpu problem, until you know more, but safe to say ram pressure isn’t to blame.
I think it's more of a bug than a ram issue, due to numerous factors, but I won't argue with you on that here. I never had this issue 2-4 years ago when I started using this Mac. How I use the Mac hasn't changed, but the quality of Mac OS certainly has. It feels like a memory leak where the PC just gets slower and slower.
Is there an easy way to find how much paging to disk in MB/s that is happening?
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iStat will give it to you in real time or historically from last 1 or 24 hrs to last 7 or 30 days.
My recollection is istats menus 6.6x has that in there. Check it out.
And look at that - Stats has it too.
brew install stats if you have Brew installed...
How to install Brew:
Namely: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Then you can install stats (and a billion other apps) with just a simple command, like brew install stats. Brew install neofetch for more fun.
brew install stats if you have Brew installed...
How to install Brew:
Namely: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Then you can install stats (and a billion other apps) with just a simple command, like brew install stats. Brew install neofetch for more fun.
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I exported a 4K 30fps movie from iMovie last night on my base M2 Pro MM. The Memory Used was about 11GB before I started, the Cached Files was at about 2GB, and the Swap Used was zero.
It was interesting to see the memory pressure spike into the red a couple of times, and the Swap Used ended up at 2.5GB at the end of the 3m30s export.
What was more interesting to me was that the sum of the Memory Used, Cached Files and Swap Used never exceeded 16GB, so MacOS was swapping before all the physical memory was used.
It was interesting to see the memory pressure spike into the red a couple of times, and the Swap Used ended up at 2.5GB at the end of the 3m30s export.
What was more interesting to me was that the sum of the Memory Used, Cached Files and Swap Used never exceeded 16GB, so MacOS was swapping before all the physical memory was used.
That's interesting. Thanks to share this. Is there a reason why this is happening, i.e creating a swap file while there was still some free memory left?