RAM usage on new rMBP

[CSF90]

Hi everyone

My brand new Retina MacBook Pro finally arrived yesterday. It's my first ever Mac and so far I'm really enjoying it. OS X is very nice and the screen is amazing.

With all that said, I'm a little confused about the RAM usage. I've got the base model, so 8GB, which I thought would be plenty. I've currently got Safari (3 tabs), Mail and Messages open. Activity Monitor (also open, obviously!) is telling me that the system is using 7.5GB!

Is this normal? I'm an experienced Windows user and would expect to have a lot more free based on what I've got open, but perhaps OS X works differently?

I didn't bother spending the extra money to get the 16GB of RAM as I thought it would be overkill, and I'm a bit OCD and like to have power/memory to spare so this is bugging me! Am I just being over-paranoid or is something wrong? I'm running Yosemite of course and am fully up to date.

Thanks!

 

[Weaselboy]

Totally normal and don't worry about it. OS X will use available RAM to cache data and apps to speed things up. As long as the memory pressure section of Activity Monitor is in the green you are good to go.

See this article.

 

[CSF90]

Totally normal and don't worry about it. OS X will use available RAM to cache data and apps to speed things up. As long as the memory pressure section of Activity Monitor is in the green you are good to go.

See this article.

Ah, thank you. I've literally spent all of my spare time in the past 24 hours reading articles on OS X and Macs. I did read about memory pressure on the Apple support site (and memory in general) but there was no clear indication of the system deliberately using it all for caches etc. The article you posted is very helpful - thank you.

 

[TechZeke]

Hi everyone

My brand new Retina MacBook Pro finally arrived yesterday. It's my first ever Mac and so far I'm really enjoying it. OS X is very nice and the screen is amazing.

With all that said, I'm a little confused about the RAM usage. I've got the base model, so 8GB, which I thought would be plenty. I've currently got Safari (3 tabs), Mail and Messages open. Activity Monitor (also open, obviously!) is telling me that the system is using 7.5GB!

Is this normal? I'm an experienced Windows user and would expect to have a lot more free based on what I've got open, but perhaps OS X works differently?

I didn't bother spending the extra money to get the 16GB of RAM as I thought it would be overkill, and I'm a bit OCD and like to have power/memory to spare so this is bugging me! Am I just being over-paranoid or is something wrong? I'm running Yosemite of course and am fully up to date.

Thanks!

Worry only about memory pressure. Confusion over the RAM usage in activity monitor plus the fact that RAM is soldered has lead to mass hysteria over RAM on the forum, so you aren't the only one. It was so bad at one point people were practically saying you needed 16GB of RAM to run chrome.

As long as RAM pressure is green, you are fine. Also, with features in OS X such as RAM compression, I have been able to stretch as much as 14-15GBs out of my 8GB in my tests. In my actual usage, I don't even come close.