32GB MacBook Pro has yellow memory pressure with <1GB swap used...

[Fomalhaut]

I've been monitoring my memory usage out of curiosity, and was surprised to find that my Activity Monitor memory pressure has been in the yellow all day, even though my swap memory usage has been low (400-700MB) the entire time.



Page in/out activity is also quite low, and there is over 4GB of file cache (that could be freed up) so I don't understand why macOS thinks there is significant memory pressure. For the last 2 weeks, I've only seen green memory pressure, with identical usage, so this is a mystery.

Any idea what determines how macOS memory pressure is calculated?

 

[mr_roboto]

Look at compressed - there's almost 13GB there. It probably thinks of this as substantial memory pressure because even though it has managed to use compression to avoid swapping much out to disk, compressed memory is still essentially a form of swap.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Look at compressed - there's almost 13GB there. It probably thinks of this as substantial memory pressure because even though it has managed to use compression to avoid swapping much out to disk, compressed memory is still essentially a form of swap.

Thanks - compressed memory is a bit of an unknown to me, but that makes sense. I'll do some more research on it. Presumably compressed memory contains applications that need to be accessed sooner than that paged out to swap, and can be considered to be "active" but requiring decompression before it can be used.

 

[leman]

Try closing your apps one by one and see how it changes the situation. You appear to have some massive memory leak going on. There is no reason why you should have this much compressed RAM. It suggests that some app or service started aggressively requesting memory and the OS had to do some emergency compacting.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

How many non-Apple Silicon Apps are you using? I have tons of issue with memory leaks because of Electron apps...

I did notice with Monterey we getting tons of compressed memory which act as SWAP which is interesting..... It does act as some type of ML that knows how you gonna behave with those apps.

I also have mine on Yellow yet I don't feel any slowdown at all.

 

[pshufd]

How many non-Apple Silicon Apps are you using? I have tons of issue with memory leaks because of Electron apps...

I did notice with Monterey we getting tons of compressed memory which act as SWAP which is interesting..... It does act as some type of ML that knows how you gonna behave with those apps.

I also have mine on Yellow yet I don't feel any slowdown at all.

View attachment 1958846

What's the name of this program that everyone is using to show memory stats?

 

[glenthompson]

IStat Menus. Quick access to lots of performance metrics.

 

[Fomalhaut]

How many non-Apple Silicon Apps are you using? I have tons of issue with memory leaks because of Electron apps...

I did notice with Monterey we getting tons of compressed memory which act as SWAP which is interesting..... It does act as some type of ML that knows how you gonna behave with those apps.

I also have mine on Yellow yet I don't feel any slowdown at all.

View attachment 1958846

Not many Intel processes using Rosetta:

I'm not sure which apps I use are Electron based. Maybe VSCode and Slack? (they are both AS-native now), but they don't show high memory usage.

I should add that I can't feel any speed difference with Yellow memory pressure.

Guess I'll need to start closing apps to see what happens to memory usage, particularly compressed.

 

[darngooddesign]

What's the name of this program that everyone is using to show memory stats?

Mac OS Activity Monitor displays a lot of useful information.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

Not many Intel processes using Rosetta:

View attachment 1959030

I'm not sure which apps I use are Electron based. Maybe VSCode and Slack? (they are both AS-native now), but they don't show high memory usage.

I should add that I can't feel any speed difference with Yellow memory pressure.

Guess I'll need to start closing apps to see what happens to memory usage, particularly compressed.

Teams
FB Messenger
What’s App are a couple of them.

VSCode hasn’t given me issues since the AS patch…

How does your Windowserver process look? Mine sometimes goes up to 2-4GB and have to restart

 

[Fomalhaut]

Teams
FB Messenger
What’s App are a couple of them.

VSCode hasn’t given me issues since the AS patch…

How does your Windowserver process look? Mine sometimes goes up to 2-4GB and have to restart

Thanks. I do use WhatsApp and FB Messenger (not always open), and Teams (but via the browser).

WindowServer sometimes uses a fair bit of CPU, but seems mostly OK for memory usage (<1GB)

 

[MrGunnyPT]

Thanks. I do use WhatsApp and FB Messenger (not always open), and Teams (but via the browser).

WindowServer sometimes uses a fair bit of CPU, but seems mostly OK for memory usage (<1GB)

Can you like get us a full screenshot of all RAM process from the AM?