What is an acceptable Memory Pressure %

[brosenz]

What is an ok percentage of memory pressure, so the computer keeps its performance and speed? What would the the threshold when things start slowing down?

 

[Weaselboy]

Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor

Use Activity Monitor on your Mac to see if memory is being used efficiently and if you need more memory (RAM).

support.apple.com

Ideally you want memory pressure to stay in the green.

 

[wilberforce]

It is also useful to look at the amount of swap being used (in Activity Monitor). Small amounts of swap (less than 1GB) are normal, but many GBs swap indicate more RAM could be beneficial.

 

[okkibs]

The only reliable way I found to figure out memory on MacOS is to periodically check the color of the pressure in Activity Monitor. If it always stays green, there will not be a performance impact. If it changes to yellow some of the time, there might be one and if it's yellow a lot of the time you will probably experience slowdowns at some point. If it ever turns red, the Mac will probably already freeze intermittently and is not up to that workflow.

Swap space no longer seems to be a good indicator with recent MacOS versions. I have machines with little to no swap and yellow pressure and I have seen it stay in the green despite having many gigabytes of swap allocated.

I do not know what is meant by pressure percentage, I don't see a percentage number anywhere.

 

[MarkC426]

I do not know what is meant by pressure percentage, I don't see a percentage number anywhere.

The percentage value is displayed in Apps like iStat Menus....

 

[gilby101]

I do not know what is meant by pressure percentage, I don't see a percentage number anywhere

Internally memory pressure is calculated (by an undocumented algorithm) from various memory counters. The number produced is expressed as between 0 and 100.

You can get the pressure number/percentage from the Terminal command `memory_pressure`. The last line of the results is "System-wide memory free percentage". Rather annoyingly this is the inverse of memory pressure. The pressure percentage is 100 - this number. The percentage is what is shown explicitly by iStat Menus and implicitly by Activity Monitor as the vertical scale of the pressure graph.

 

[dmr727]

If you don't perceive the computer to be slowing down, what does it matter? We can't add memory, so why torture yourself with worrying about where the threshold would be?