My new MBP - memory usage

[TheLastUserName]

So after 7 years, I just got a new MBP -- a 16". The only decision I struggled with was whether to spend money on going from 18 to 36 GB of memory. I am not a heavy user by any means. At any given time, I am using Safari, Dropbox, Pages, and Spotify. I do use Monday.com through the browser, and it uses memory in the background.

I just checked into the Activity monitor for the first time, and I see that "memory used" is 27.53 GB. On the one hand, that would help explain the wonderful increase in performance. On the other hand, if what I am doing is using over 27 GB of memory, I am perplexed that Apple is selling machines with 8 and 18 GB. It seems to me that that will most certainly create an unresolvable bottleneck in performance.

My advice: spend your money on more memory, not more processor.

 

[Isamilis]

You should check the memory pressure instead of memory usage. MacOS by nature will use all free RAM. I have slightly heavier tasks than yours (I use pdf expert and office 365 extensively plus some other note taking apps), and I never experienced slowdown and rarely had yellow memory pressure with 8gb RAM only (M2 Air).

 

[dmccloud]

So after 7 years, I just got a new MBP -- a 16". The only decision I struggled with was whether to spend money on going from 18 to 36 GB of memory. I am not a heavy user by any means. At any given time, I am using Safari, Dropbox, Pages, and Spotify. I do use Monday.com through the browser, and it uses memory in the background.

I just checked into the Activity monitor for the first time, and I see that "memory used" is 27.53 GB. On the one hand, that would help explain the wonderful increase in performance. On the other hand, if what I am doing is using over 27 GB of memory, I am perplexed that Apple is selling machines with 8 and 18 GB. It seems to me that that will most certainly create an unresolvable bottleneck in performance.

My advice: spend your money on more memory, not more processor.

The amount of memory being used is actually less relevant when it comes to Mac OS and how memory is managed. On Macs, the default behavior is to use as much of the available RAM as possible. What is more important (as Isamills pointed out) is the memory pressure. There is a good explanation of how memory pressure works here.

Right now, I'm not using a lot of RAM on my machine, despite having Visual Studio Code, Netbeans, XCode, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher, and Blender open. The memory pressure is virtually nonexistent despite having that many apps open at once:


The way Mac OS and Apple Silicon handle memory usage is also why so many people use systems with either 8 or 16GB of RAM without running into major issues. I didn't start seeing issues with my M1 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM until I started editing 4k video on the system, which is why I decided to spec out my current machine to allow for future growth.

 

[TheLastUserName]

The amount of memory being used is actually less relevant when it comes to Mac OS and how memory is managed. On Macs, the default behavior is to use as much of the available RAM as possible. What is more important (as Isamills pointed out) is the memory pressure. There is a good explanation of how memory pressure works here.

Right now, I'm not using a lot of RAM on my machine, despite having Visual Studio Code, Netbeans, XCode, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher, and Blender open. The memory pressure is virtually nonexistent despite having that many apps open at once:

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The way Mac OS and Apple Silicon handle memory usage is also why so many people use systems with either 8 or 16GB of RAM without running into major issues. I didn't start seeing issues with my M1 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM until I started editing 4k video on the system, which is why I decided to spec out my current machine to allow for future growth.

Very helpful. Thanks to both of you.