After Sonoma is Installed, Does it Need 1GB+ of Virtual Memory to Avoid a Crash?

[Alvin777]

Hello Apple friends, after installing Sonoma, does it still need space if modern OSes still use virtual memory so that it does not crash? If a modern OS like Sonomas still uses virtual memory to mix with physical RAM, what's the minimum amount of space (GB) does it need to function properly?

 

[Alvin777]

Hello Apple friends, after installing Sonoma, does it still need space if modern OSes still use virtual memory so that it does not crash? If a modern OS like Sonomas still uses virtual memory to mix with physical RAM, what's the minimum amount of space (GB) does it need to function properly?

I found the answer the space should be 30GB at least (Xcode will complain for example if it's lower than that, if it's around 20GB+) but it's still good to experiment to 1GB free space (w/ a duplicate or another macOS backup installation on another disk or another volume in the same 'Container').

 

[Ben J.]

The advice I generally see with modern SSD technology is that you should never even get close to filling up a drive, especially the one you boot from. One thing is that if your RAM is too small so macOS will use the disk to help with that, (what you refer to as virtual memory) so-called "swapping", the other is that SSDs will work much harder if there is little free space on them, thus slowing down and wearing out faster. (You can see the memory load in the Activity Monitor app, and how much swapping is being used.)

I try to keep well below 70% used space on my SSDs, and around 50% on my startdisk.