Where is all my memory going?

[Canadia69]

I have known Macs like to use up a lot of memory but I just don't understand what process is using that much?

I am used to doing a very similar workflow on a 2019 map with 16gb of ram, I remember it using 4-5gb of swap which was a couple more gb than the processes I could add up on Activity Monitor but now I see 47gb used..? Does macOS really eat up an extra 20-25gb of memory?

Where is it going or what could possibly using this much?

 

[xraydoc]

Free RAM is wasted RAM. Let macOS keep things in memory to speed up launching, opening, etc.
It's not "going" anywhere. It's being used. This is what you want. Let your machine run faster by keeping all kinds of recently used things in RAM in case they get called upon again.
You have plenty of memory left... only 46.5GB of 64GB used and zero swap. Memory pressure (more important to look at than free RAM) is barely registering.

 

[Canadia69]

Free RAM is wasted RAM. Let macOS keep things in memory to speed up launching, opening, etc.
It's not "going" anywhere. It's being used. This is what you want. Let your machine run faster by keeping all kinds of recently used things in RAM in case they get called upon again.
You have plenty of memory left... only 46.5GB of 64GB used and zero swap. Memory pressure (more important to look at than free RAM) is barely registering.

Ok i guess this is normal, just crazy to see 46gb used lol.

Thanks for the input!

 

[xraydoc]

Ok i guess this is normal, just crazy to see 46gb used lol.

Thanks for the input!

Yep. Totally normal. macOS will purge cached RAM contents if an app requires more “free” memory than is available with the cached material.

An easy to see example of this is when you launch an app for the first time after a boot… takes several “bounces”. After you quit the app, launching again takes only one, maybe two “bounces”. But then open a process that uses up a lot of RAM, end it, then open that first app again — will take a similar number of “bounces” as it did when the machine was first booted. The more RAM available, the less frequently the cache gets purged, and the more responsive your Mac will feel.

 

[Canadia69]

Yep. Totally normal. macOS will purge cached RAM contents if an app requires more “free” memory than is available with the cached material.

An easy to see example of this is when you launch an app for the first time after a boot… takes several “bounces”. After you quit the app, launching again takes only one, maybe two “bounces”. But then open a process that uses up a lot of RAM, end it, then open that first app again — will take a similar number of “bounces” as it did when the machine was first booted. The more RAM available, the less frequently the cache gets purged, and the more responsive your Mac will feel.

very insightful, thank you again

 

[JSRinUK]

It is odd to see it. On my new Mac Studio with 128GB RAM, Activity Monitor shows -

Memory Used: 77.79GB
Cached Files: 45.47GB
Swap Used: 19.9MB

No idea what those few MBs are doing in swap - maybe they had an argument with the data in RAM... 🤣

But, anyway, I’m not doing a lot more than I did with my MacBook Pro that has 24GB RAM. If that much RAM was *really* required for the Mac to run, I think my MacBook Pro would have given up months ago.

My guess is that MacOS is designed to “load up the RAM” in efforts to predict what you might do next to make the experience smoother and faster. The more RAM you have, the more it can “load up” and the better experience you’ll have. Not having that much RAM is no hardship - it just can’t pre-load quite as much.