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I thought my MBP's 16GB was fine. For a long time I rarely saw usage over 8GB. But for a few months everything was running rather slow and I put it down to ot
by jlokier 6y ago
I thought my MBP's 16GB was fine. For a long time I rarely saw usage over 8GB.
But for a few months everything was running rather slow and I put it down to other causes.
One day I looked at the memory usage and saw it was using 10GB swap in addition to about 14.5GB RAM. And when I clicked things that responded slowly, the memory pressure meter was lighting up. Swapping was why it was slow.
It's pretty fast swap, being on SSD, but it was the reason for the slowdowns. Probably not doing the SSD any good either (they wear out if written to constantly).
Turns out Safari was using 8GB by itself. Restarting Safari helped (it's quick to restart which is nice). Safari, like Chrome, uses a lot of memory after opening a bunch of tabs because of using separate processes for each tab.
I also use Firefox, but it uses 6-8GB for me too.
Then there's my VM running my Linux dev environment. Now I only give it 4GB, which is a bit tight but I run some things remotely so it's ok. I had to shrink it from 6GB to get my performance back.
Sometimes I'm foolish enough to have LibreOffice or MS Word open to look at documents. They aren't memory hogs, but when you've lost most of it to the browser(s) and dev VM, little things like office apps push it a few GB over the edge.
I'm also running Emacs with quite a lot loaded into it, and many iTerms, but they use so little RAM compared with the big stuff, it barely registers.
Nowadays I pay more attention to memory use, mostly use only one browser at a time, and restart more often.
Even so, it's hovering around 5GB swap at the moment, and I haven't got much going on at the moment.
Based on this, I know I can live with 16GB but it is restricting what I use and how I work now. 32GB would be let me stop thinking about RAM again, and I expect in a few years it will be nearly full, as usage tends to grow over time (as I found already).
If I could buy a new MBP knowing I could upgrade the RAM I'd be happy to buy at 16GB, but as you can't upgrade, and I want a new laptop to last at least 5 years, I wouldn't be comfortable buying a dev machine at 16GB now.