7 ms·

MacBook Air, M2 Chip, 8GB RAM: Nothing is open, but half the memory is gone

50 points by lopkeny12ko 2y ago

not_your_vase 2y ago
Haha, do you remember when Apple said that "8GB Mac RAM is equivalent to 16GB RAM on other operating system", and just when the world started to laugh at them, mysteriously Altman got fired from OpenAI, and everyone forgot about Apple? </half-ironic tinfoil hat off>
Someone 2y ago
It isn’t gone, it’s used. There may be a problem, but this data point IMO doesn’t provide any evidence for that. One way to do better is to launch a program that uses lots of RAM, and measure by how much that slows down other processes, whether it makes the Ui stutter, etc.
talldayo 2y ago
Yep. Surprise! This is what happens when you replace 90% of your window views with WebKit processes rendering HTML. You'd think that Apple saw how poorly this ended for Windows, but no they just had to join in the fun too. No, zram is not a good enough excuse to suffer through 8gb of memory on a Mac. Thank you Project Marzipan/Catalyst. I love having hundreds of Safari processes running my OS instead of native Cocoa, yessiree.
- Pfhortune 2y ago
  I thought Marzipan/Catalyst were still native, just bridged over from the mobile OSes. Are they really using web tech to render them?
  - internetter 2y ago
    OP is misrepresenting it, because its not just mac catalyst, its really everything. I don't understand the full scope, but there is definitely a browser renderer being used for text. See this[0], which I encountered only after days of confusion about why my text was looking suspiciously[1] like the default browser stylesheet [0]: https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/12/uitextview-caught-with-trousers-down/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/12/uitextview-caught-with-t... [1]: https://shottr.cc/s/1O4j/SCR-20240811-2un.png https://shottr.cc/s/1O4j/SCR-20240811-2un.png
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    Catalyst apps are native, yes.
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    I don’t know what he’s talking about. Catalyst is actually pretty complex, and is indeed native — it seeks to bridge the API differences between uikit and appkit — it’s not the macOS equivalent of electron using webtech.
superkuh 2y ago
Apple's irresponsible sales of unupgradable 8GB ram 256GB storage laptops have lead to plenty of work for consumer tech support. It's just kind of sad seeing the same thing over and over. "I can't open $x because I'm out of memory." and "Time machine won't back-up anymore." (because their internal storage is full and isn't enough to generate the back-up to send to the octopus of external drives they have to use). And of course the inevitable breaking of the fragile externals and loss of data.
- internetter 2y ago
  I use a mac with 8gb of ram for professional development — I use it in intensive ways with at least 15 windows open, many of them electron processes. With the notable exception that I must restart my computer about once a week, the system performs flawlessly. 8gb of RAM is fine, and I am not[0] an Apple fanboy. I'd be more angry if I was on the pro model and still only getting 8gb, but that would just be anger out of the principle of it. Edit: currently I have 20 browser tabs, 3 vscode windows, 2 development servers (and services like postgres and colima to support them) postico 2, spotify, slack, discord, mail, messages, calendar, and a handful of background apps like shottr, raycast, rcmd, rectangle and lunar open. The computer isn't even hot. Its swapping aggressively I'm sure, but its not noticeable. [0]: https://boehs.org/node/private-apis https://boehs.org/node/private-apis
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Do you use Docker? I had a 16gb Mac a while ago and I had to debug half our code on a metered EC2 because my Docker VM would OOM every time I tried running it, even with everything else closed. When I hear the "professional development on 8gb Mac" line I typically imagine SaaS webdev or Swift/Applescript writing. Trying to imagine the monorepos I've worked on running on a base Macbook Air... unless you're using it as an SSH frontend I don't think you'd be very productive.
    - internetter 2y ago
      I edited this comment to say colima. Colima is running a few containers that replicates our prod. We do use slim images, but why wouldn't we. > Swift/Applescript writing You dramatically underestimate the resources required to run Swift. I'm also developer license holder, and XCode brings the laptop to its knees. It is usable, but "XCode developers" are one of the small groups of people for who I'd recommend a ram upgrade.
subjectsigma 2y ago
So, going to sound like an Apple apologist here, but a couple of times I tried to track memory usage on my Mac and it didn’t make sense. I looked up some articles about why processes seemed to be using massive amounts of RAM and others seemed to be reporting extremely small usages. The articles said basically that macOS RAM usage is hard to measure because Activity Monitor basically reports what the process thinks it has, not what is actually allocated. I can’t seem to find the article again so take this with a grain of salt I could just be yapping
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  The article is correct. It’s the amount of ram the program asked for (virtual memory I think) The kernel has reserved address space but has not used ram until the program accesses it. There is a separate metric for ram actually in use by a program. But that number isn’t an ideal “ram used” because it doesn’t account for compression or swap. Linux is basically the same.
thruhiker 2y ago
I have this exact build of MacBook Air and in day to day use browsing the web, doing some light coding, and connecting to Kubernetes clusters hosted in the cloud, I don't really notice. There is definitely some disk swapping occurring but you don't really notice it in small amounts due to how fast the SSDs are. Would I recommend the 8GB of RAM to someone who wants to use it as their primary development machine or for heavy photo editing, absolutely not. Would I say it's OK for casual use, yes. Do I think Apple is being stingy considering their incremental cost for an extra 4GB or 8GB of RAM in the base model would be tiny, yes.
- sudofail 2y ago
  I thought this as well and bought my wife the 8GB model, thinking it would be enough for her casual use. With nothing open but Chrome or Safari (dozens of tabs, sure) it will lock up and sometimes even hard restart. 8GB is just not enough for anyone anymore.
  - kcartlidge 2y ago
    I'd strongly consider returning the machine. This is very far from my normal experience with an 8GB M1 over several years (as a developer as well as a casual user).
  - acdha 2y ago
    Either there’s something much bigger running or the hardware is defective. I used an 8GB M1 with VSC, Podman, Slack, etc. for a few years during the pandemic and it was fine. Chrome is a notorious memory hog but even then it was okay so I’d review the installed extensions if it’s that high.
- jacobp100 2y ago
  Is it swapping to disc, or compressing the memory?
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  If someone's primary use case is heavy media editing, I wouldn't recommend an Air in the first place. It has its uses for casual people and coders who primarily work in the cloud, but let's not pretend that it is a high end business level laptop.
znpy 2y ago
Two of them is file cache, which still leaves with the base os consuming 2.71 GB ram out of 8, but it's never exactly eight... it's always a little less. So basically an 8GB laptop is really a 6GB laptop. Yikes. Also, it's already using ~540mb of swap memory... Swap usage will kill the flash chip pretty fast. Besides everything, this will generate an incredible amount of e-waste.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  It doesn't matter. People buy those toy computers for their style. It's a fashion statement, a status symbol. Style over substance.
lemonwaterlime 2y ago
Apparently, with the unified memory, Apple has taken the approach that unused RAM is useless RAM. Therefore, the system is greedy at allocating RAM and will release it to higher priority processes as they request it. Your system at baseline will always use "a lot" of RAM. This is to be expected.
- justinclift 2y ago
  So why does the picture show ~1/2GB of swap in use?
  - kergonath 2y ago
    MacOS is a bit enthusiastic about swap (and memory compression) and won’t necessarily take stuff out of swap before it is actually needed. That’s why you can have both available RAM and non-zero swap use.
- gruez 2y ago
  >Therefore, the system is greedy at allocating RAM and will release it to higher priority processes as they request it. Can this be substantiated? "the system is greedy at allocating RAM and will release it to higher priority processes as they request it" is cold comfort to someone with 10 chrome tabs open and the system freezing up as a result.
  - varenc 2y ago
    > Can this be substantiated? Sort of. Use the `memory_pressure` CLI tool. You can use it to just simulate a critical memory warning and you’ll immediately see the system free up a lot of RAM. In macOS parlance the key metric is “memory pressure”. From the tweet’s screenshot you can see memory pressure is only about 20%.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >In macOS parlance the key metric is “memory pressure”. From the tweet’s screenshot you can see memory pressure is only about 20%. I searched around[1][2] and it's unclear how the chart is actually derived. It should therefore be treated with suspicion, along with other opaquely defined metrics like wework's "community EBITDA". [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202744/what-is-memory-pressure-and-how-do-i-relieve-it https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202744/what-is-mem... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200415041837/https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464 https://web.archive.org/web/20200415041837/https://support.a...
pimlottc 2y ago
My understanding is that processes generally don't give back memory until it's actually needed, so looking at memory usage in a low-usage state is often misleading. The real test is whether memory is quickly available when requested.
- gruez 2y ago
  >My understanding is that processes generally don't give back memory until it's actually needed No, programs that release memory when there's high memory pressure is the exception, not the rule. You'd have to specifically go out of your way to code that in. A basic program that allocates some memory, and then frees it is going to cause the system memory usage to drop immediately.
encoderer 2y ago
People are never going to understand RAM, but once more, for the cheap seats: It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again.
- gruez 2y ago
  >It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again. It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. If you bought a system with 16 GB of ram, and the system just decided to eat 15GB of that for its own opaque purposes, leaving 1GB for your workloads, you'd be pretty miffed as well.
  - JohnBooty 2y ago
    It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. It is and this is the thing that people -- even software engineers -- usually misunderstand. Evicting cached data is for all intents and purposes a zero cost operation. That's why modern operating systems cache aggressively when they're not busy doing anything else: there's really no downside. If I'm caching file xyz.dll, and it turns out xyz.dll isn't needed, it's not like I have to write it back to disk or do any other (significant) work to evict it from the cache. So yes: that memory is available, at no additional cost, for any reasonable definition of "available" and "no additional cost." Honestly, why do so many just assume that the core OS kernel devs at multiple zillion-dollar companies get this fundamental Operating Systems 101 thing so spectacularly wrong in modern OSs?
    - encoderer 2y ago
      Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Still doesn’t get RAM. RAM will never be understood.
      - hagbard_c 2y ago
        > Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Us vs. them based on 'karma' gives me bad vibes. If anything the fact that 'high-karma' users don't grasp low-level operating systems mechanics is a tell-tale sign of what it takes to get high up in the karma ladder. Better to keep that karma for what it is - a semi-functional means to keep out the trolls - and focus on the message instead of the messenger.
MissTake 2y ago
Computers use RAM and Water is wet. Sorry, not seeing the issue here - RAM is designed to be used. Why would it flush it if there’s no pressure? If one gets high swap then that’s a problem, but until then it’s simply the OS preemptively caching because “why not?”. If you’ve paid for 8GB then you’d expect the OS to use it. Not sure why anyone would want the OS to purge memory when it doesn’t need to. It costs nothing to keep it ready and the OS can either page it out or get rid of it as and when needed. This isn’t just Macs - happens on Windows as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/11zp2ao/high_ram_usage_even_when_not_running_any_big/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/11zp2ao/high_ram...
- sigzero 2y ago
  Is water wet? "Most scientists define wetness as a liquid's ability to maintain contact with a solid surface, meaning that water itself is not wet, but can make other sensation. But if you define wet as 'made of liquid or moisture', as some do, then water and all other liquids can be considered wet."
- gruez 2y ago
  >Sorry, not seeing the issue here - RAM is designed to be used. Why would it flush it if there’s no pressure? What indication is there that it could be flushed? The OP is referring to the 4.71GB used figure specifically. "Cached files" clearly can't possibly count towards that, because if you try to add that and the usages to the right (ie. app/wired/compressed) memory, you'll go above 4.71GB. Of items in the rightmost column, which can be "flushed"? All of them look pretty important. Does "flush" mean "swap to disk" for you?
renewiltord 2y ago
Got my mum an M1 a while ago and my dad an M3. Lowest spec. It’s been great. They used their old one for six years each. These laptops rule. Amortized cost of $200/year including opp. cost of laptop. Great value for money. They can view x-rays and make presentations. Happy with that.
goosedragons 2y ago
This is essentially the same as my 8GB Surface Pro X. Lack of RAM is definitely felt. It's OK for basic web browsing and tasks like word processing but it's not hard to tank.
ProfessorZoom 2y ago
>gets the device targeted for people that do every task ever in a browser like students or corporate people >complains about ram lol
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  My browser is using 32GB right now. 8GB is a joke.
more_corn 2y ago
Wow, it’s almost like the OS is taking up some ram and doing some OS related stuff. Which is perfectly normal and expected. 8gb RAM is completely insufficient these days. Apple has been attempting to create a culture of scarcity for years, locking more ram away behind a thousand dollar upgrade when in reality it’s $20 worth of chips under a sane, user serviceable architecture.
WhitneyLand 2y ago
Well RAM can be an interesting trade off. Have the last MacBook Pro Core i9 model with 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD and in trying to sell it the prices seem super low way less than 1k. I bet the M2 is worth way more.
geor9e 2y ago
This person is making a logical error. Their computer was running slow, so they freed up all the RAM they could. The computer immediately saw all that unused RAM, and filled it with temporary cache from the SSD, as computers do. It speeds up future reads and can be dropped immediately if needed for something else. Now he's taking that as evidence that the computer was wasting RAM the entire time, causing the slowness. To do it right he needs to open ram-hungry chrome tabs until the computer gives up all the RAM it can and screams for mercy, then subtract that amount from 8GB. That will give you the actual amount the system wont give up.
mhx1138 2y ago
Despite all the Ui tricks and metrics handwaving, even 16GB is not enough for a fluent dev-environment, with an IDE, a browser, slack, teams and docker. My 6 years old xps 13 with 16GB ram and Linux feels as slow as mbp m1 with 16 gb. 8gb is a slap in the face.
nolist_policy 2y ago
And here my Chromebook with 8Gb ram has dozens of tabs and web apps open in Chrome, runs one VM with Android and another VM with Linux in turn running Firefox and more. All without breaking a sweat.
sys_64738 2y ago
It’s already started compressing unused pages. In the old days we’d see those hit spinners.
robenkleene 2y ago
The comments on this thread illustrate an epidemic of ignorance of basic knowledge of macOS memory management (e.g., doing the laymen's mistake of looking at how much memory is used by applications, which is not a useful metric). At the very least you should read this article and note that this is from over a decade ago when memory management on macOS was comparatively simple https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-19-mac-os-x-process-memory-statistics.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-19-mac-os-x... If you're not OS engineer with a specific specialization in memory management, I'd suggest just sticking to the Apple article on this subject, which explains the easy way of evaluating whether you're experiencing memory-related slow downs https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/check-if-your-mac-needs-more-ram-actmntr34865/ https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/check-if-yo...

50 points by lopkeny12ko 2y ago

Haha, do you remember when Apple said that "8GB Mac RAM is equivalent to 16GB RAM on other operating system", and just when the world started to laugh at them, mysteriously Altman got fired from OpenAI, and everyone forgot about Apple? </half-ironic tinfoil hat off>

Someone 2y ago

It isn’t gone, it’s used. There may be a problem, but this data point IMO doesn’t provide any evidence for that. One way to do better is to launch a program that uses lots of RAM, and measure by how much that slows down other processes, whether it makes the Ui stutter, etc.

talldayo 2y ago

Yep. Surprise! This is what happens when you replace 90% of your window views with WebKit processes rendering HTML. You'd think that Apple saw how poorly this ended for Windows, but no they just had to join in the fun too. No, zram is not a good enough excuse to suffer through 8gb of memory on a Mac. Thank you Project Marzipan/Catalyst. I love having hundreds of Safari processes running my OS instead of native Cocoa, yessiree.

Pfhortune 2y ago
I thought Marzipan/Catalyst were still native, just bridged over from the mobile OSes. Are they really using web tech to render them?
- internetter 2y ago
  OP is misrepresenting it, because its not just mac catalyst, its really everything. I don't understand the full scope, but there is definitely a browser renderer being used for text. See this[0], which I encountered only after days of confusion about why my text was looking suspiciously[1] like the default browser stylesheet [0]: https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/12/uitextview-caught-with-trousers-down/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/12/uitextview-caught-with-t... [1]: https://shottr.cc/s/1O4j/SCR-20240811-2un.png https://shottr.cc/s/1O4j/SCR-20240811-2un.png
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Catalyst apps are native, yes.
- whynotminot 2y ago
  I don’t know what he’s talking about. Catalyst is actually pretty complex, and is indeed native — it seeks to bridge the API differences between uikit and appkit — it’s not the macOS equivalent of electron using webtech.

superkuh 2y ago

Apple's irresponsible sales of unupgradable 8GB ram 256GB storage laptops have lead to plenty of work for consumer tech support. It's just kind of sad seeing the same thing over and over. "I can't open $x because I'm out of memory." and "Time machine won't back-up anymore." (because their internal storage is full and isn't enough to generate the back-up to send to the octopus of external drives they have to use). And of course the inevitable breaking of the fragile externals and loss of data.

internetter 2y ago
I use a mac with 8gb of ram for professional development — I use it in intensive ways with at least 15 windows open, many of them electron processes. With the notable exception that I must restart my computer about once a week, the system performs flawlessly. 8gb of RAM is fine, and I am not[0] an Apple fanboy. I'd be more angry if I was on the pro model and still only getting 8gb, but that would just be anger out of the principle of it. Edit: currently I have 20 browser tabs, 3 vscode windows, 2 development servers (and services like postgres and colima to support them) postico 2, spotify, slack, discord, mail, messages, calendar, and a handful of background apps like shottr, raycast, rcmd, rectangle and lunar open. The computer isn't even hot. Its swapping aggressively I'm sure, but its not noticeable. [0]: https://boehs.org/node/private-apis https://boehs.org/node/private-apis
- talldayo 2y ago
  Do you use Docker? I had a 16gb Mac a while ago and I had to debug half our code on a metered EC2 because my Docker VM would OOM every time I tried running it, even with everything else closed. When I hear the "professional development on 8gb Mac" line I typically imagine SaaS webdev or Swift/Applescript writing. Trying to imagine the monorepos I've worked on running on a base Macbook Air... unless you're using it as an SSH frontend I don't think you'd be very productive.
  - internetter 2y ago
    I edited this comment to say colima. Colima is running a few containers that replicates our prod. We do use slim images, but why wouldn't we. > Swift/Applescript writing You dramatically underestimate the resources required to run Swift. I'm also developer license holder, and XCode brings the laptop to its knees. It is usable, but "XCode developers" are one of the small groups of people for who I'd recommend a ram upgrade.

subjectsigma 2y ago

So, going to sound like an Apple apologist here, but a couple of times I tried to track memory usage on my Mac and it didn’t make sense. I looked up some articles about why processes seemed to be using massive amounts of RAM and others seemed to be reporting extremely small usages. The articles said basically that macOS RAM usage is hard to measure because Activity Monitor basically reports what the process thinks it has, not what is actually allocated. I can’t seem to find the article again so take this with a grain of salt I could just be yapping

kayodelycaon 2y ago
The article is correct. It’s the amount of ram the program asked for (virtual memory I think) The kernel has reserved address space but has not used ram until the program accesses it. There is a separate metric for ram actually in use by a program. But that number isn’t an ideal “ram used” because it doesn’t account for compression or swap. Linux is basically the same.

thruhiker 2y ago

I have this exact build of MacBook Air and in day to day use browsing the web, doing some light coding, and connecting to Kubernetes clusters hosted in the cloud, I don't really notice. There is definitely some disk swapping occurring but you don't really notice it in small amounts due to how fast the SSDs are. Would I recommend the 8GB of RAM to someone who wants to use it as their primary development machine or for heavy photo editing, absolutely not. Would I say it's OK for casual use, yes. Do I think Apple is being stingy considering their incremental cost for an extra 4GB or 8GB of RAM in the base model would be tiny, yes.

sudofail 2y ago
I thought this as well and bought my wife the 8GB model, thinking it would be enough for her casual use. With nothing open but Chrome or Safari (dozens of tabs, sure) it will lock up and sometimes even hard restart. 8GB is just not enough for anyone anymore.
- kcartlidge 2y ago
  I'd strongly consider returning the machine. This is very far from my normal experience with an 8GB M1 over several years (as a developer as well as a casual user).
- acdha 2y ago
  Either there’s something much bigger running or the hardware is defective. I used an 8GB M1 with VSC, Podman, Slack, etc. for a few years during the pandemic and it was fine. Chrome is a notorious memory hog but even then it was okay so I’d review the installed extensions if it’s that high.
jacobp100 2y ago
Is it swapping to disc, or compressing the memory?
sigmoid10 2y ago
If someone's primary use case is heavy media editing, I wouldn't recommend an Air in the first place. It has its uses for casual people and coders who primarily work in the cloud, but let's not pretend that it is a high end business level laptop.

znpy 2y ago

Two of them is file cache, which still leaves with the base os consuming 2.71 GB ram out of 8, but it's never exactly eight... it's always a little less. So basically an 8GB laptop is really a 6GB laptop. Yikes. Also, it's already using ~540mb of swap memory... Swap usage will kill the flash chip pretty fast. Besides everything, this will generate an incredible amount of e-waste.

surgical_fire 2y ago
It doesn't matter. People buy those toy computers for their style. It's a fashion statement, a status symbol. Style over substance.

lemonwaterlime 2y ago

Apparently, with the unified memory, Apple has taken the approach that unused RAM is useless RAM. Therefore, the system is greedy at allocating RAM and will release it to higher priority processes as they request it. Your system at baseline will always use "a lot" of RAM. This is to be expected.

justinclift 2y ago
So why does the picture show ~1/2GB of swap in use?
- kergonath 2y ago
  MacOS is a bit enthusiastic about swap (and memory compression) and won’t necessarily take stuff out of swap before it is actually needed. That’s why you can have both available RAM and non-zero swap use.
gruez 2y ago
>Therefore, the system is greedy at allocating RAM and will release it to higher priority processes as they request it. Can this be substantiated? "the system is greedy at allocating RAM and will release it to higher priority processes as they request it" is cold comfort to someone with 10 chrome tabs open and the system freezing up as a result.
- varenc 2y ago
  > Can this be substantiated? Sort of. Use the `memory_pressure` CLI tool. You can use it to just simulate a critical memory warning and you’ll immediately see the system free up a lot of RAM. In macOS parlance the key metric is “memory pressure”. From the tweet’s screenshot you can see memory pressure is only about 20%.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >In macOS parlance the key metric is “memory pressure”. From the tweet’s screenshot you can see memory pressure is only about 20%. I searched around[1][2] and it's unclear how the chart is actually derived. It should therefore be treated with suspicion, along with other opaquely defined metrics like wework's "community EBITDA". [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202744/what-is-memory-pressure-and-how-do-i-relieve-it https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/202744/what-is-mem... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200415041837/https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464 https://web.archive.org/web/20200415041837/https://support.a...

pimlottc 2y ago

My understanding is that processes generally don't give back memory until it's actually needed, so looking at memory usage in a low-usage state is often misleading. The real test is whether memory is quickly available when requested.

gruez 2y ago
>My understanding is that processes generally don't give back memory until it's actually needed No, programs that release memory when there's high memory pressure is the exception, not the rule. You'd have to specifically go out of your way to code that in. A basic program that allocates some memory, and then frees it is going to cause the system memory usage to drop immediately.

encoderer 2y ago

People are never going to understand RAM, but once more, for the cheap seats: It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again.

gruez 2y ago
>It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again. It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. If you bought a system with 16 GB of ram, and the system just decided to eat 15GB of that for its own opaque purposes, leaving 1GB for your workloads, you'd be pretty miffed as well.
- JohnBooty 2y ago
  It's "gone" in the sense that it's not available for other useful stuff. It is and this is the thing that people -- even software engineers -- usually misunderstand. Evicting cached data is for all intents and purposes a zero cost operation. That's why modern operating systems cache aggressively when they're not busy doing anything else: there's really no downside. If I'm caching file xyz.dll, and it turns out xyz.dll isn't needed, it's not like I have to write it back to disk or do any other (significant) work to evict it from the cache. So yes: that memory is available, at no additional cost, for any reasonable definition of "available" and "no additional cost." Honestly, why do so many just assume that the core OS kernel devs at multiple zillion-dollar companies get this fundamental Operating Systems 101 thing so spectacularly wrong in modern OSs?
  - encoderer 2y ago
    Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Still doesn’t get RAM. RAM will never be understood.
    - hagbard_c 2y ago
      > Guy has 34k karma. He’s one of us. Us vs. them based on 'karma' gives me bad vibes. If anything the fact that 'high-karma' users don't grasp low-level operating systems mechanics is a tell-tale sign of what it takes to get high up in the karma ladder. Better to keep that karma for what it is - a semi-functional means to keep out the trolls - and focus on the message instead of the messenger.

MissTake 2y ago

Computers use RAM and Water is wet. Sorry, not seeing the issue here - RAM is designed to be used. Why would it flush it if there’s no pressure? If one gets high swap then that’s a problem, but until then it’s simply the OS preemptively caching because “why not?”. If you’ve paid for 8GB then you’d expect the OS to use it. Not sure why anyone would want the OS to purge memory when it doesn’t need to. It costs nothing to keep it ready and the OS can either page it out or get rid of it as and when needed. This isn’t just Macs - happens on Windows as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/11zp2ao/high_ram_usage_even_when_not_running_any_big/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/11zp2ao/high_ram...

sigzero 2y ago
Is water wet? "Most scientists define wetness as a liquid's ability to maintain contact with a solid surface, meaning that water itself is not wet, but can make other sensation. But if you define wet as 'made of liquid or moisture', as some do, then water and all other liquids can be considered wet."
gruez 2y ago
>Sorry, not seeing the issue here - RAM is designed to be used. Why would it flush it if there’s no pressure? What indication is there that it could be flushed? The OP is referring to the 4.71GB used figure specifically. "Cached files" clearly can't possibly count towards that, because if you try to add that and the usages to the right (ie. app/wired/compressed) memory, you'll go above 4.71GB. Of items in the rightmost column, which can be "flushed"? All of them look pretty important. Does "flush" mean "swap to disk" for you?

renewiltord 2y ago

Got my mum an M1 a while ago and my dad an M3. Lowest spec. It’s been great. They used their old one for six years each. These laptops rule. Amortized cost of $200/year including opp. cost of laptop. Great value for money. They can view x-rays and make presentations. Happy with that.

goosedragons 2y ago

This is essentially the same as my 8GB Surface Pro X. Lack of RAM is definitely felt. It's OK for basic web browsing and tasks like word processing but it's not hard to tank.

ProfessorZoom 2y ago

>gets the device targeted for people that do every task ever in a browser like students or corporate people >complains about ram lol

throwaway48476 2y ago
My browser is using 32GB right now. 8GB is a joke.

more_corn 2y ago

Wow, it’s almost like the OS is taking up some ram and doing some OS related stuff. Which is perfectly normal and expected. 8gb RAM is completely insufficient these days. Apple has been attempting to create a culture of scarcity for years, locking more ram away behind a thousand dollar upgrade when in reality it’s $20 worth of chips under a sane, user serviceable architecture.

WhitneyLand 2y ago

Well RAM can be an interesting trade off. Have the last MacBook Pro Core i9 model with 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD and in trying to sell it the prices seem super low way less than 1k. I bet the M2 is worth way more.

geor9e 2y ago

This person is making a logical error. Their computer was running slow, so they freed up all the RAM they could. The computer immediately saw all that unused RAM, and filled it with temporary cache from the SSD, as computers do. It speeds up future reads and can be dropped immediately if needed for something else. Now he's taking that as evidence that the computer was wasting RAM the entire time, causing the slowness. To do it right he needs to open ram-hungry chrome tabs until the computer gives up all the RAM it can and screams for mercy, then subtract that amount from 8GB. That will give you the actual amount the system wont give up.

mhx1138 2y ago

Despite all the Ui tricks and metrics handwaving, even 16GB is not enough for a fluent dev-environment, with an IDE, a browser, slack, teams and docker. My 6 years old xps 13 with 16GB ram and Linux feels as slow as mbp m1 with 16 gb. 8gb is a slap in the face.

nolist_policy 2y ago

And here my Chromebook with 8Gb ram has dozens of tabs and web apps open in Chrome, runs one VM with Android and another VM with Linux in turn running Firefox and more. All without breaking a sweat.

sys_64738 2y ago

It’s already started compressing unused pages. In the old days we’d see those hit spinners.

robenkleene 2y ago

The comments on this thread illustrate an epidemic of ignorance of basic knowledge of macOS memory management (e.g., doing the laymen's mistake of looking at how much memory is used by applications, which is not a useful metric). At the very least you should read this article and note that this is from over a decade ago when memory management on macOS was comparatively simple https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-19-mac-os-x-process-memory-statistics.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-19-mac-os-x... If you're not OS engineer with a specific specialization in memory management, I'd suggest just sticking to the Apple article on this subject, which explains the easy way of evaluating whether you're experiencing memory-related slow downs https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/check-if-your-mac-needs-more-ram-actmntr34865/ https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/check-if-yo...