4 ms·

I.. don't know. I'm a relatively new (~12mths) convert from a lifetime of Windows, and one of the things that has really surprised me is that I don't seem to ne

I.. don't know. I'm a relatively new (~12mths) convert from a lifetime of Windows, and one of the things that has really surprised me is that I don't seem to need to care about RAM usage. I actually had to look up how to find out. I'm mostly photo editing (Exposure, XnView, Nitro) or doing small dev projects (VSCode, Rider). On a my old Dell laptop with 16GB RAM, I'd have to actively monitor RAM usage if I wanted Exposure to run well, shut down most other apps etc. On my MBP with 16GB, it has never been an issue. Right now I have: Mail, LibreWolf, Signal, Jellyfin, Bitwarden, LibreOffice, XnView, Nitro, Terminal, Safari, Calibre, Remote Desktop, WIIM Home, Notes and Rider open, along with a host of background things like VPN, Syncthing etc. Activity Monitor says 14.2GB used. But I'm not sure if that number matters, because I've never noticed running out of RAM.

deletedie 2y ago
macOS tends to view unused RAM as wasted RAM so it uses as much as possible which is different to the Windows approach. The integrated SSDs are also optimised for swap to aid with that. So the ideal outcome should be like you said, not having to care about usage
- emptiestplace 2y ago
  No, this is ridiculous - all modern operating systems use 'unused' RAM for disk cache.
  - jasomill 2y ago
    As an example: with ripgrep searching the entire (500 GB) C: drive for a fixed string, Task Manager reports: CPU: 61% 2.49 GHz Memory: 10.3/48.0 (21%) Disk 0 (C:): SSD 100% In use (Compressed): 10.1 GB (0 MB) Available: 37.7 GB Hardware reserved: 1.0 MB Committed: 8.9/48.8 GB Cached: 37.9 GB Paged pool: 2.0 GB Non-paged pool: 979 MB Observe that “Available” ≅ “Cached”. The system is a VM with 48 GB RAM and an 800 MB pagefile running Windows 11 (and lots of background processes: Emacs, Tailscale, sshd, WSL, NVIDIA and Adobe shovelware, etc.).

deletedie 2y ago

macOS tends to view unused RAM as wasted RAM so it uses as much as possible which is different to the Windows approach. The integrated SSDs are also optimised for swap to aid with that. So the ideal outcome should be like you said, not having to care about usage

emptiestplace 2y ago
No, this is ridiculous - all modern operating systems use 'unused' RAM for disk cache.
- jasomill 2y ago
  As an example: with ripgrep searching the entire (500 GB) C: drive for a fixed string, Task Manager reports: CPU: 61% 2.49 GHz Memory: 10.3/48.0 (21%) Disk 0 (C:): SSD 100% In use (Compressed): 10.1 GB (0 MB) Available: 37.7 GB Hardware reserved: 1.0 MB Committed: 8.9/48.8 GB Cached: 37.9 GB Paged pool: 2.0 GB Non-paged pool: 979 MB Observe that “Available” ≅ “Cached”. The system is a VM with 48 GB RAM and an 800 MB pagefile running Windows 11 (and lots of background processes: Emacs, Tailscale, sshd, WSL, NVIDIA and Adobe shovelware, etc.).