8GB MBA Using Too Little Swap

[alien3dx]

I have been saying this for 15 years. More than "the web" itself, it's the technologies behind it that are horrible (html, css, js, http). And today, more and more traditional apps are being rewritten with that garbage.

Another thing I've been saying for maybe 7 or 8 years, is that 8 GB aren't adequate anymore for any work. Even my gaming PC has 32 gigs, and it's 10 (ok, that was probably an overkill).

actually not , web these day reduce as min as possible but some part like ajax/ xhr cocurrent take a lot of toll to browser. These day , some streaming like never end making the browser need to remember large amount data and some when to sqlite. Ask these day web browser . 10 a browser x2 . chrome + safari + other other.

 

[YanniDepp]

UNIX is very good at managing RAM by itself. It has a policy of "unused RAM is wasted RAM" so it caches a lot of stuff in RAM that doesn't really need to be there. Files that are accessed often, stuff that it needs to write to slower disks but hasn't gotten round to doing get (especially USB sticks, which is why it's a bad idea to just pull them out).

When that RAM is needed for something more important, it throws away all that cached stuff and writes things to disks. You can forcibly do this with the sync command in the terminal.

Just because your machine says it's using 7.5GB of RAM doesn't mean it really is, which means it might not actually need any swap space.

 

[alien3dx]

UNIX is very good at managing RAM by itself. It has a policy of "unused RAM is wasted RAM" so it caches a lot of stuff in RAM that doesn't really need to be there. Files that are accessed often, stuff that it needs to write to slower disks but hasn't gotten round to doing get (especially USB sticks, which is why it's a bad idea to just pull them out).

When that RAM is needed for something more important, it throws away all that cached stuff and writes things to disks. You can forcibly do this with the sync command in the terminal.

Just because your machine says it's using 7.5GB of RAM doesn't mean it really is, which means it might not actually need any swap space.

you cannot compare unix / linux with macos . Totally diff world. 4GB ram is okay on linux .The one of my mistake buying 4GB mac mini 2014. Macos and Windows these day at least min 16 GB for normal user the good one. For work more the better.

 

[SeenJeen]

They probably limited swap after people were complaining about high SSD write counts.

 

[jtkiley]

A couple months back, I ran a decent-sized data job on my 16GB MBP M1 Pro, and it used over 80GB of swap after compressing a big chunk of physical RAM. It managed to stay surprisingly responsive and still beat a 2020 iMac with 64GB handily (in terms of wall time) on the same task.

At least for anything I've thrown at M1 Macs (M1 up to M1 Max), the memory management has been fine, and I'm a relatively heavy RAM user (for data science).

 

[Apple_Robert]

Focus on what the memory pressure shows and forget the rest

 

[NT1440]

actually not , web these day reduce as min as possible but some part like ajax/ xhr cocurrent take a lot of toll to browser. These day , some streaming like never end making the browser need to remember large amount data and some when to sqlite. Ask these day web browser . 10 a browser x2 . chrome + safari + other other.

But you’re forgetting Ads.

My machines are always noticeably faster at loading webpages because of my ad blockers. I’d wager the majority of page loading/response time there’s days is more related to the terrible state of online advertising than anything the page itself contains.

 

[jdb8167]

you cannot compare unix / linux with macos . Totally diff world. 4GB ram is okay on linux .The one of my mistake buying 4GB mac mini 2014. Macos and Windows these day at least min 16 GB for normal user the good one. For work more the better.

MacOS is Unix, Linux is not. Your point on RAM on Linux is probably correct though.

 

[alien3dx]

MacOS is Unix, Linux is not. Your point on RAM on Linux is probably correct though.

prefer not to compare either macos is bsd or not . Desktop os and server os diff world . Freebsd or linux can run in most min ram as possible . The best now desktop os should be 16gb ram no matter os .

 

[Leon1das]

This statement is a bit problematic, because web browsing has slowly become the no. 1 most RAM-heavy workload.

I did an experiment a couple of hours ago, trying to memory starve my 16 GB Air. I launched literally every single app I have on the MacBook, including a game (Disco Elysium), a small VM with NixOS, my heavyweight IDE (RubyMine) and one of my web apps, some 3D modeling SW (Blender), a game dev engine + IDE (Godot). I opened a couple of DSLR photos in Affinity Photo, started Spotify, started playing a movie in VLC, opened every app bundled with macOS, and my memory pressure was still in green.

Then I added Safari with 10 tabs and Firefox with a bunch of JS-heavy sites and boom, 6 gigabytes of swapped memory.

The web sucks.

Web sucks and is bloated.

For daily browsing (Chromium based browsers) shave off x86 lib from my browsers and remove unneeded languages using Monolingual. That makes them 250-300mb in size.

Then disable all "smart" web page preloading and caching features.

Then use uBlock to prevent all unneeded page elements like ads, webfonts etc...

So yes - enemy got tougher, but we can do much more to fight it