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> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That
by post-it 7mo ago
> macOS 15 uses ~5GB on startup without any app open
Sort of? Mac very aggressively caches things into RAM. It should be using all of your RAM on startup. That's why they've changed the Activity Monitor to say "memory pressure" instead of something like "memory usage."
I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. I've got ChatGPT, VSCode, XCode, Blender, and PrusaSlicer minimized and I'm not feeling any lag. If I open any of them it'll take half a second or so as they're loaded from swap, but when they're not in the foreground they're not using up any memory.
- MYEUHD 7mo agoIn macOS 15 there are two metrics: "Memory used" and "Cached Files" I'm specifically talking about "Memory used" here. In fact, on my 16GB mac, if I open apps that use ~8GB of RAM (on top of the 5GB I mentioned earlier), it starts swapping.
- KerrAvon 7mo agoHow do you define "swapping?" Even on Intel Macs, the memory statistics don't map the way one might expect. Be careful when making assumptions about what those metrics actually mean.
- MYEUHD 7mo agoI mean at that point (13 GB memory used), the "Swap used" is at several hundred megabytes. And if I more apps (or browser tabs), the "Swap used" keeps increasing, and the "memory pressure" graph switches color from green to yellow. The color of that graph is the indicator I'm using to know that I should close my browser tabs :p
- intenex 7mo agoWhen you open up Activity Monitor, to the immediate left of the "Memory Used" and "Cached Files" that you see, you'll see the Memory Pressure graph that the guy above is talking about. On my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro right now, I have 53.41 GB of Memory Used and 10.72 GB of Cached Files and 6.08 GB of swap, but Memory Pressure is green and extremely low. On my 8 GB M1 Macbook Air I just bought for OpenClaw, I'm at 6.94 GB Memory Used and 1.01 GB of Cached Files with 2.05 GB of Swap Used, and Memory Pressure is medium high at yellow, probably somewhere around 60-70%. You can open up the Terminal and run the command memory_pressure to get much more detailed data on what goes into calculating memory pressure - more than just the amount of swap used, it tracks swap I/O and a bunch of page and compressor data to get a more holistic sense of what's going on and how memory starved you're going to feel in practice. In any case - I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new have been - even with tons of Chrome tabs open, multiple terminal windows open, running OpenClaw and Claude Code and VS Code and doing a ton of development and testing, never once have they ever felt slow. Oftentimes they actually feel faster than my 64 GB M1 Macbook Pro, which kind of blows my mind and makes me wonder wtf is going on on my monster machine. Moreover, my M1 Macbook Pro drains battery like crazy and uses a ton of charge, whereas the Macbook Airs stay constantly below 10 watts essentially always and even with Amphetamine keeping them on 24/7, with the display off and being fully on, they'll drop to a single watt of power draw. Truly insane stuff. I've lost all my concern about RAM, to be honest (which is shocking coming from someone who bought a top of the line maxed out RAM primary machine in 2021 specifically because I felt like RAM was so important)
- tomcam 7mo ago> I've been absolutely mindblown at how fast my 3 8GB M1 Macbook Airs I just bought for ~$350 brand new Wait what? How did you manage that?
- darkwater 7mo agoOpenClaw found some sweet deal? /s
- pitched 7mo agoMacBook Air M1 was released six years ago. That’s pretty expensive for such an old machine!
- vablings 7mo agoThey hold value very well. Still a perfectly good machine today and probably a better deal than the neo if you find one in good condition
- asimovDev 7mo agodon't thinkpads from the similar time go for the same amount of money? seems like an alright price for a machine of that vintage, although thinkpad is obviously superior here since it would always be able to run linux or windows (well that one is not guaranteed) without much, if any, trouble
- parl_match 7mo agoYes, the person you are replying to has explained that. The old mental model of how ram and swap works doesn't fit neatly to how modern macos manages ram. 8GB is acceptable, although on the lower end for sure.
- Twirrim 7mo agoThe old mental model doesn't fit how any OS manages RAM. Every OS plays all sorts of fun guessing games about caching, predicting what resources your program will actually need etc. The OS does a lot of work to ensure that everything just hums along as best as possible.
- qmr 7mo agoWhat are you slicing? What do you find compelling with Prusa slicer over orca slicer?
- post-it 7mo agoI'm printing a new multi-laptop stand that can accommodate a work laptop I've just received. I've actually never used Orca, PrusaSlicer is the first one I tried and it's done everything I've needed.
- tomcam 7mo ago> I'm typing this on an 8 GB MacBook Air and it works just fine. Most cool. Is it an M1?
- alistairSH 7mo agoNot the OP, but I have an M1 MBA and it handles light "coding" stuff quite well, though haven't tried VSCode+Zoom+bunch of other stuff, as my work laptop is a M1 MBP.
- tomcam 7mo agoSame. I've been programming in Go on an M1 for years and perf is spectacular.
- post-it 7mo agoM2
- sudo_cowsay 7mo agoEarly 2020 i3 macbook air
- astrange 7mo agoThere's a lot of different kinds of "using". "Memory pressure" includes some kinds of caching (ie running idle daemons when they could get killed) and not others (file caching). And there are also memory pressure warnings (telling processes to try to use less memory), so there's a lot of feedback mechanisms. I don't suggest sitting and looking at Activity Monitor all day. I think that is a weird thing to do as a user. If you would like to do that in an office in Cupertino or San Diego instead then you can probably figure out where to apply.
- znpy 7mo agoi think the main point that GP was trying to make is that depending on the workload 8gb of memory might not be an issue. the keywords here are "depending on the workload". edit: i was thinking that it's gonna be interesting to see i/o performance on storage, that might end up determining if those 8 gigabytes are actually decent or not.
- wrs 7mo agoIndeed, as I used to tell my ops colleagues when they pointed to RAM utilization graphs, "we paid for all of that RAM, why aren't we using it?"
- jcelerier 7mo agobecause memory access performance is not O(1) but depends on the size of what's in memory (https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html). Every byte used makes the whole thing slower.
- SkiFire13 7mo agoMemory access performance depends on the _maximum size of memory you need to address_. You can clearly see it in the graph of that article where L1, L2, L3 and RAM are no longer enough to fit the linked list. However while the working set fits in them the performance scales much better. So as long as you give priority to the working set, you can fill the rest of the biggest memory with whatever you want without affecting performance.
- stevefan1999 7mo agowhy is it not O(1)? It has to service within a deadline time, so it is still constant.
- yunnpp 7mo ago> Every byte used makes the whole thing slower. This is an incorrect conclusion to make from the link you posted in the context of this discussion. That post is a very long-winded way of saying that the average speed of addressing N elements depends on N and the size of the caches, which isn't news to anyone. Key word: addressing.
- rileymat2 7mo agoI am not following, isn't this just a graph that shows that how fast operations happen is largely dependent on the odds that it is in cache at various levels (CPU/Ram/Disk)? The memory operation itself is O(1), around 100 ns, where at a certain point we are doing full ram fetches each time because the odds of it being in CPU cache are low? Typically O notation is an upper bound, and it holds well there. That said, due to cache hits, the lower bound is much lower than that. You see similar performance degradation if you iterate in a double sided array the in the wrong index first.
- nomel 7mo agoIt also compresses memory. Many things in ram compress really well.
- Yizahi 7mo agoMemory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM. I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?
- nomel 7mo ago> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised. Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user. The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly. 8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.
- macintux 7mo agoGruber said something[0] that parallels your point, and emphasizes the target audience for this Mac: > If you know the difference between sRGB and P3, the Neo is not the MacBook you want. Apple has made extensive tradeoffs to make this price point, but they all seem to be reasonable tradeoffs for casual users. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_macbook_neo https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/599_not_a_piece_of_junk_m...
- sufehmi 7mo agoAfter several days of usage, Activity Monitor will usually shows that "WindowServer" is using 6 GB of RAM. Yeah, 8 GB RAM does not cut it anymore. At least until Apple start fixing the memory leaks in MacOS.
- amazingman 7mo agoUnused RAM is wasted RAM. If your machine isn't reporting memory pressure and/or the user isn't experiencing pageouts, then the machine is well-suited to the user's workload.
- alright2565 7mo agoI'd rather my ram go to my page cache, not have bloated apps hoarding it.
- mrtesthah 7mo agoBut I thought Electron was the future?
- gizajob 7mo agoHave you tried turning it off and on again?
- peapicker 7mo agoUptime of 13 days. My WindowServer is at 441Mb. ??? (32Gb RAM M2Max MBPro)
- astrange 7mo agoProbably a badly behaved app. Run `IOAccelMemory` to check.
- cmontella 7mo agoI remember when Windows Vista had to contend against the same allegations when it was released. It did have a higher memory footprint, but a lot of the ridiculous usage numbers people had published were the SuperFetch just precaching commonly used programs to give better application startup times.
- torginus 7mo agoTbf when Big Sur was released, it was leaking like crazy. It was a daily ritual for me to kill Dock and Finder after they've eaten all my RAM.
- uncSoft 7mo agoHa, wasn't it windows vista that allowed you to plug an SD card to use for swap space/fake ram?
- ForOldHack 7mo agoSpeedBoost was supported by vista through windows 10, and although windows 11 regognises a speed boost USB, I do not know it it uses it. When I put windows 11 on two i5 8gb machines and plugged in two speed boost drives, it did not swap a lot to them, whereas in windows 7, under memory load it would use them, at least until I found ChacheMem v2.1 it would manage memory much better than windows ever could. Windows back to window 2.1 386 supported swapdisks, i.e fake ram.
- nilsbunger 7mo agoI found Google Chrome makes an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM almost unusable, unless you're really careful to keep only a few tabs only. I'm curious what browser you were using and if you had any similar experience.
- msh 7mo agoI have heard this before and am curious what kind of sites you open in the tabs? I have a 8GB m1 mac mini and I dont see any issue with browsing in chrome (right now I have 11 tabs open).
- nilsbunger 7mo agoIt was my son’s laptop , he’s in high school. General Google Classroom / Google Docs / Gmail / web research stuff. He’s not technical at all. I bought him the 8GB machine thinking it would be fine, but it became a big problem for him. I do think part of the problem was number of tabs open. It was a little better when I taught him how to manage tabs and I also turned up all the memory saving features in chrome. But even with all of that, it would still slow down with what looked like a pretty minimal workload. I spent a few hours with him on it, but he still had these kinds of issues. It just seems like it requires a decent level of sophistication to work with a small RAM budget if you’re using Google software.
- Foobar8568 7mo agoNo you don't work just fine with all that or you aren't doing much. Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast. Just rust plugin in vs code uses 3gb of ram. Add a browser, and you are already over 8GB.
- wtallis 7mo ago> Your SSD is swapping like crazy and will die really fast. Just how quickly do you think the SSDs will die? Because there are a lot of 8GB M1 machines out there that have been getting daily use for five years, mostly with 256GB or 512GB storage configs. When do you expect them to fail?
- Foobar8568 7mo agoDepends of the usage. I just know that with 48GB I have a few TB or tens of TB written within a couple of hours when playing with homomorphic search.
- wtallis 7mo agoSo you're predicting that 8GB machines will fail prematurely based on extrapolation from an extreme niche use case that doesn't remotely fit on those machines?
- jval43 7mo agoUsing an M2 8GB Mac Mini, I only ever ran into problems when trying generative fill in Photoshop. There I get insufficient memory errors if the selection is too large.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[flagged]
- api 7mo agoLinux does this too. It uses 100% of your ram always, using free memory as cache. Actually figuring out free RAM is kind of confusing.