Memory Pressure Ranges - RAM Amounts

[newellj]

I'm thinking about the perennial 8 vs 16 (vs 32 now, if you use a 15") RAM question.

What do people think is the acceptable range of memory pressure? I'm seeing anywhere from ~ 25-50%, always green. This MBP has 8GB of RAM, which is what I've had in most of my Mac laptops for the last 5-6 years. I'm thinking about a 16GB update, but I don't think that kind of pressure supports spending another $200. Thoughts?

 

[brdeveloper]

I have a quad Macbook Pro with 8GB. In my experience, memory pressure only gets red when I run commands that deal with large files, e.g., ImageMagick for reducing file size of scanned pages from a court case I've scanned from my iPhone, or when I open a machine learning tool like Weka and load it with 100MB spreadsheets. Otherwise, when dealing with office stuff and browsing, memory pressure never becomes yellow.

In other words, when dealing with large files, I think there's not an "enough" amount of RAM. I'd always prefer having 64GB or 128GB. I think hexa-core i9s can take advantage of large amounts of RAM when dealing with these specific tasks. When you buy a maxed-out Macbook you never use all resources every time. The normal usage would be the underutilization of resources. You pay the premium to make use of these resources at some specific situations. Someone would say software that use such a large amount of resources is badly programmed, and I agree. But sometimes these are the only tools we have unless we spend time developing a more efficient tool.

 

[mick2]

If its always green, then its of little benefit getting more, assuming your usage patterns continue sinilarly.
Modern OSs are pretty good at managing data in and out of RAM efficiently, and this is aided with the advent of fast SSDs for use in paging.
I'd only increase if you're frequently hitting the red in Mem Pressure graph, or if you anticipate drastically changing the activities you use your machine for.