In the old days. Current SSDs have lifespans of nearly 2 million hours.
The problem part isn’t clear to me… They have a lot of RAM, it uses that RAM. Presumably one buys a lot of RAM so that it can be used. I’d be more likely to call it a problem if I had any free RAM and lost some modicum of performance because of it.
This is a known problem with all versions of AE below 23.1. Apparently this update fixed the memory hogging problems with AE. Make sure the current version of AE is 23.1 at least or later. A link to the discussion on the adobe community forum in respect of this issue..... https://helpx.adobe.com/in/after-effects/kb/after-effects-low-memory-warning-mechanism.html
I blame everything on Adobe. (running joke in the office and home).
There was a post on Hacker News earlier this week talking about the problem with browsers taking up available memory for caching of tabs that is related to this. The problem is that the OS virtual memory swap system can't differentiate between allocated pages that contain information that must be retained versus memory that is being used for cache and could theoretically be thrown away instead of paged out to disk. I don't know anything about AE but if the RAM used is like cached browser tabs, it is the same problem.
I think we both agree and just went about saying it in a different manner. 32GB vs 240GB (which is what my upgrade was for my 7,1) completely changed how performant After Effects is. Totally night and day difference. Of course the other problem is that my total VRAM with W6800X Duo was 64GB which was probably not ideal for my workloads only having initially 32GB of system RAM.I'm not an AE user, so there's probably some nuances that I'm missing, but this seems like the wrong idea. A lot of people are able to get by with 8GB for their entire system RAM, so reserving 48GB for background and OS tasks seems wasteful.
Thinking about the Adobe allocation is the backwards way of looking at it. In essence consider your computer to be two computers-- your Adobe computer and your non-Adobe computer. Think about the non-Adobe allocation.
AE will use all the RAM it is given for caching preview frames-- so filling RAM is by design. If you reduce the allocation, you get to cache fewer frames. That's less useful, but not catastrophic.
96 minus the Adobe block is left for everything else. If you don't reserve enough for everything else then the system treats that Adobe allocation just like everyone else and will evict it from RAM into swap which might not be that noticeable with the very, very fast internal SSD, I dunno, but it does undermine the purpose of the RAM cache.
Before it starts going to swap though, it will begin compressing in RAM and with 96GB available, and the frames being cached uncompressed, there's a lot of squishiness before anything starts to swap. You don't need to be overly conservative.
So what you want to assess isn't how much memory you need for Adobe, but how much memory you need for everything else and yes, that sadly means freaking Chrome tabs in this day and age. If you want a bigger preview buffer, don't run with a bunch of tabs or unnecessary applications open.
Adobe makes guessing the right allocation the users problem. Adobe won't shift its allocation dynamically, which seems like bad design to me as it renders the OS's swapping mechanism toxic, but it is what it is. Set the preference and live within your choice or risk swap and stuttering. Having read a bit more about what Adobe is doing, I resonate more strongly with this comment:
The GPU memory isn't a separate allocation. With a GPU card, the process will likely stage data in application space and then copy it to the GPU card, process it, and then bring it back-- so the GPU memory is in addition to the application memory. With unified memory the GPU can access application space directly without needing needing a copy-- so it's the same application RAM requirement without needing a separate GPU allocation. ie. no extra allocation needed for GPU.
The Adobe RAM pool is shared among Adobe CC apps and Adobe does allocate that pool dynamically-- so if you are using Photoshop, you don't need to account for it separately.
The bottom right pane in this image says everything: the system has more than enough RAM and hasn't swapped anything to disk. The current memory allocation looks just fine. I don't know where this image came from, so I'm not sure how to read the upper right pane, but it looks like there's still some headroom before it would even think about swapping.
AE is sorta like that; AE will start rendering frames to RAM so that playback previews can be played in real time. You can of course turn this off.
Your internal drive is faster and you have a TON of space on it. This generally goes against the common wisdom when getting a machine for video work (wherein you only have software installed on the internal drive and work on projects exclusively on other volumes). That all being said, there's nothing wrong with using your internal drive to work on active projects and then offloading your finished projects onto an external. With a 4TB drive, it almost makes too much sense NOT to do it that way. And no, you won't wear out your 4TB drive to any seriously noticeable faster degree. Just make sure you keep regular Time Machine backups and the odds are that you'll probably need a logic board replacement for something not drive related anyway.
You know how some people are they just want to overkill on everything including - paranoia lol
Really, that's insane... even with PrePro, Photoshop and Lightroom being used on a daily basis?
Just a note... My 16' MBP 64GB Ram ... I've written 54TB to my internal 4TB SSD in about a year and it still shows 100% health/life with Drive DX. Jealous of your ram.
You don't need to worry about stuff like ssds wearing out especially now days and especially with your machine.
I looked into it and still capping out at 87%