this:
So, you cannot prove it? Then this is just an opinion.
Where would hundreds of gigs used be coming from?
Mac OS cannot just load the memory with random stuff, it's not a builders skip!
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For people who believe 64GB memory is too much. It's possibly not.
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Where would hundreds of gigs used be coming from?
Mac OS cannot just load the memory with random stuff, it's not a builders skip!
I don't remember me or anyone in this thread suggesting that, so where is this coming from?
From using the computer. The browser, random files, images, etc. you computer clears things from RAM to leave a buffer. With more room, it would cache more stuff.
Unless this computer is only ever used to open work on the same single file all day every day for its entire lifetime, in which case I have some questions.
Thanks, but again, it's a bet.
I do understand general principles that most of the 75GB are other opened background applications.
However, when you switch back to Rhino for example and start rotating a massive 3D model - are you sure this won't cause a massive lag on 32GB?
Switching back from that to an absolutely huge application map in Adobe XD and apply some map-wide changes, won't that cause a massive lag on 32GB?
We just can't be sure, can we?
People seem to confuse me with someone who advocates spending all of their life's savings to buy 128GB RAM directly from Apple for any use case. Obviously, it's not what I'm saying.
And I didn’t say you said it? It’s coming from my point that no one really says 64GB is “too much memory”, people say that less is sufficient. If less is often more than sufficient then 64GB is unnecessary, and at Apple’s pricing that’s pretty wasteful. I genuinely think I made the point pretty clearly in the original post, but hopefully this clears it up.
Again, no need for this argument, it comes across as repetitive and political.
We've already established that 16GB is enough for most people.
My post was primarily to show that in real-world use, without opening any kind of movie files and working on just 1 project file per large application, Mac OS uses 75GB for application memory, plus 18.5GB for caching.
Nobody is suggesting to anyone to get any specific amount of RAM.
The meaning of this post is for undecided potential buyers to examine their RAM requirements very carefully.
I didn’t realise RAM shopping was hot political issue. Maybe I need to watch the news more.
This is a misunderstanding, the unified memory means the graphics can already use what the app has in memory directly, you don't need the additional 16GiB of VRAM. The VRAM only needs to exist on the Intel machine because the graphics cannot access the RAM fast enough directly. The overall app memory requirement might be a bit higher, but generally whatever is copied to the VRAM was already processed by the app and thus was likely in memory already. Of course if you have an app that processes 16GiB worth of data in graphics then the app itself will take up 16GiB and more in memory. But whereas with Intel it was limited to the VRAM size now it can go beyond that until the RAM is filled up. So if you have anything that can benefit from huge amounts of VRAM then getting more memory on a modern Mac might be good. For example for machine learning even my 24GiB of dedicated VRAM with Intel weren't that much, on a new Mac I can set it up to use even more and if the entire Mac only got 32GiB or even 16GiB then this would just fail to work at all. (It either hangs the Mac to the point of the mouse cursor responding slowly or instantly fails allocating the memory.)
...yes, exactly. The only reason we don't do that is that RAM is volatile, expensive, and such a solution would require dedicated hardware designed for it... which we once had. With Intel Optane persistent memory you got hundreds of Gigabytes on a single memory stick and that memory was non-volatile. It offered lower latencies and better performance than NVMe storage and thus was very expensive. Intel discontinued it a while ago so clearly it didn't work out. But if it wasn't prohibitively expensive to replace the entire SSD in a consumer device with non-volatile RAM we'd probably be doing that already.
Keep in mind just a bit over a decade ago we were still using SATA/AHCI storage and the NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD speeds of today would have seemed absolutely ridiculous to us, imagine seeing an 8TB NVMe MBP back then. 8TB HDDs didn't even exist let alone 8TB of flash storage. So maybe we will run the entire OS in RAM one day. It's not even that absurd to think about that now. MacOS boots off an immutable snapshot that's just 10GB or so in size, copying that to memory on boot would be a matter of mere seconds today already.
That's not how this works or any of it. I had a 768GiB Mac Pro at work and it idled at about 25GB used just the same as on my 64GiB M1 Max MBP. Unless an app actively requires or reserves that memory such as running VMs for example you will not be using "into the hundreds of gigs". Where are these "hundreds of gigs" supposed to come from? Reading posts like these is just so wild to me, making things up out of thin air and disguising that by saying it would be "likely". No it would not be. You are making it up.
I said active use, ie wired memory, the cached app memory is not in active use, it’s purgeable by the system at any time
"Active" memory doesn't mean "Wired" or "System" memory.
What about the memory used by the application which is currently opened and has focus? Won't it crash if you purge this memory?
There's no such thing as too much memory. The issue here is that Apple had deliberately designed non-upgradability into all its computers for the specific purpose of gouging customers. RAM and SSD components are comparatively cheap and yet can effectively bottleneck a computer, forcing customers to pay outrageous upgrade prices because they cannot go back later. In other words when you buy an Apple you're forced to buy your anticipated future needs upfront or risk having to buy a new one less than five years down the road.
We need legislation to prohibit such practices if only for environmental purposes. I would gladly take a thicker MBP with slightly shorter battery life if both RAM and SSD can be made modular. If Apple wants to make us pay a premium for even that, at least we have the OPTION of upgrading later.
Apart from that Apple is deliberately dragging along at 8 GB RAM and trying to convince everyone that their capacity is worth more than it is when most test show that it's not. What Apple should do is make 16 GB the standard and allow users the option to downgrade and save $100... let's see how well that plays out.
We need legislation to prohibit such practices if only for environmental purposes. I would gladly take a thicker MBP with slightly shorter battery life if both RAM and SSD can be made modular. If Apple wants to make us pay a premium for even that, at least we have the OPTION of upgrading later.
Apart from that Apple is deliberately dragging along at 8 GB RAM and trying to convince everyone that their capacity is worth more than it is when most test show that it's not. What Apple should do is make 16 GB the standard and allow users the option to downgrade and save $100... let's see how well that plays out.
The problem is that you didn't show that. Throughout the the thread you were more defensive rather than curious and when others tried to educate you where you lack knowledge, you didn't get that and you were more defensive. Almost felt like you are trying to prove your point regardless of what the reality is.
Anyway, I hope that you will step back from this and recalibrate yourself so eventually you will be willing to learn instead of defending nonsense.
Anyway, I hope that you will step back from this and recalibrate yourself so eventually you will be willing to learn instead of defending nonsense.
I kinda agree with the OP but don't want to be mistaken for his given arguments. If you're using in excess of 32 GB RAM (Not having it but using it all) you're in the professional or extreme gamer tier. At that point you need as much RAM as you need for your professional tasks. And odds are that expense is well worth it to you for saving time and/or increasing your task load.
The question of 8 or 16 GB pertains to entry level or casual users. These represent the vast majority of Apple customers and this most often won't affect the pro users whatsoever. Much as I've love to see Apple up the ante and make their baseline 64 GB they simply don't have any financial incentive to do so. The fact they can charge $200 USD just to upgrade from 8 to 16 is too lucrative for them to just give up.
Now what they're doing is cashing in on customer loyalty. I'm so outraged that I'm keeping my intel Apples for as long as they can remain relevant. I refuse to buy a new machine under present conditions. If all customers were like me Apple would go bust, but I'm still a minority... for now.
The question of 8 or 16 GB pertains to entry level or casual users. These represent the vast majority of Apple customers and this most often won't affect the pro users whatsoever. Much as I've love to see Apple up the ante and make their baseline 64 GB they simply don't have any financial incentive to do so. The fact they can charge $200 USD just to upgrade from 8 to 16 is too lucrative for them to just give up.
Now what they're doing is cashing in on customer loyalty. I'm so outraged that I'm keeping my intel Apples for as long as they can remain relevant. I refuse to buy a new machine under present conditions. If all customers were like me Apple would go bust, but I'm still a minority... for now.
A modern OS will make use of whatever memory you have for keeping stuff in RAM it would otherwise swap out (idle stuff) and/or disk cache.
Just because your machine is "using" 50+ GB of RAM or whatever, it doesn't always mean it is needed.
Note: I'm not saying there aren't uses for hundreds of GB of RAM or more in some cases. Just that reading numbers off activity monitor without context or thought as to what is going on with the machine is not the way to evaluate that.
Evaluate performance: if it is a problem, then go looking for the source of the problem. if it isn't a problem, don't go trying to identify performance bottlenecks by looking at numbers alone.
Just because your machine is "using" 50+ GB of RAM or whatever, it doesn't always mean it is needed.
Note: I'm not saying there aren't uses for hundreds of GB of RAM or more in some cases. Just that reading numbers off activity monitor without context or thought as to what is going on with the machine is not the way to evaluate that.
Evaluate performance: if it is a problem, then go looking for the source of the problem. if it isn't a problem, don't go trying to identify performance bottlenecks by looking at numbers alone.
Even if photoshop doesn't purge itself, a Mac (or windows machine) with less memory will be more proactive about dropping cache.
But if you have the RAM spare dumping things out of cache "just because" before the OS actually DOES need that memory for something else is pointless. If a large memory allocation request comes in and there's a heap of unused cache, THAT is the time to drop it. Not before.
Totally unused memory is memory that could be doing something better, even if it is acting as a cache just in case something is requested again.
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And yes, this is complicated to measure. This is why apple/macOS does this for you with the "memory pressure" graph. That's the most accurate overview of how stressed the machine is for resources as it represents how often the machine is trying to actually access memory that isn't available. The machine itself can calculate that based on far more metrics than it can display or that you can easily read on activity monitor.
I've pushed my M1 Pro into orange and eventually red memory pressure and it was still fairly responsive. Orange was not noticeable in terms of response compared to green for my usage.
YMMV, but suffice to say - if you want to get an overview of whether the machine is stressed for memory, use the memory pressure graph and don't over think it by trying to investigate the numbers. If the graph is orange or red - then go looking for what is consuming it all.
If your memory pressure is green you'e basically looking for problems that don't exist.
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The “Memory” column in monitor is misleading. It shows all the memory that OS allocated for the app (after cache and compression), even if the app itself doesn’t need this memory right now. It is some kind of pages prefetching.
If you right click on table header, you will be able to turn on “Real Memory” column, which will display the real amount of memory used by the app. Usually, is is much smaller then what you have in “Memory” column.
If you right click on table header, you will be able to turn on “Real Memory” column, which will display the real amount of memory used by the app. Usually, is is much smaller then what you have in “Memory” column.
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@Gloor This is an example of a meaningful reply, where everything is fact based, covers new ground, gives new data and hence is useful for me and everyone else in this forum as an answer. It doesn't mention any nonsensical thigs like "Modern OSs try to fill up memory" or "With 1TB RAM you will have hundreds of GB used" - I will always challenge such things. If it comes across as defensive, well, I'm willing to be challenged here, but I will challenge back
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Essentially any modern platform will try to keep everything it has ever loaded into memory for as long as possible, including:
Also modern CPUs are fast enough now and normally have enough "spare" idle cores to make memory compression feasible to improve memory usage without any significant hit to performance on a lightly cpu loaded machine (Which is basically anything that isn't grinding through rendering jobs or such).
Obviously there are limits to this and you can't just run more and more infinitely without adding more actual memory.
But it does go some way to explain why and how 8 GB of RAM is still enough for some people's uses today despite being the sensible baseline for some years now (I'd consider 8 to have been a sensible baseline back in 2011).
Data sizes have grown a bit, but so has the technology in the OS memory management, improved SSD speed for less noticeable swap and more CPU cores for memory compression. The tech to more effectively manage memory has probably advanced slightly faster than our real world memory consumption in recent years.
- filesystem cache - disk blocks that have been recently read or written to
- this can include recently opened files, or parts of files, etc.
- this can also include idle memory pages that the OS has prepared to swap out, but hasn't yet dumped. if something is idle, the OS can write its pages to disk without actually removing it from memory until required. This way, if a huge memory allocation comes in larger than available free memory, it can just instantly drop the idle memory it already paged to disk in advance. I believe this will show as "cached" memory as well. i.e., such memory pages are both "in memory" and "written to virtual memory" ready to be dropped immediately without needing to wait for them to be paged out at that point (already paged to disk in advance)
- shared libraries - if an app is closed the memory from either itself or libraries it loaded may not be immediately freed in case the app is re-opened or another similar app is opened which would load the libraries again
Also modern CPUs are fast enough now and normally have enough "spare" idle cores to make memory compression feasible to improve memory usage without any significant hit to performance on a lightly cpu loaded machine (Which is basically anything that isn't grinding through rendering jobs or such).
Obviously there are limits to this and you can't just run more and more infinitely without adding more actual memory.
But it does go some way to explain why and how 8 GB of RAM is still enough for some people's uses today despite being the sensible baseline for some years now (I'd consider 8 to have been a sensible baseline back in 2011).
Data sizes have grown a bit, but so has the technology in the OS memory management, improved SSD speed for less noticeable swap and more CPU cores for memory compression. The tech to more effectively manage memory has probably advanced slightly faster than our real world memory consumption in recent years.
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users were saying this in some form or another since you've started the conversation. Were you ignoring it then just because it wasn't worded precisely you needed?
No, they weren't.
You're moving away from the main topic, so hopefully this one more question-answer will be enough to close this sub-thread.
No one said they pushed their Apple Silicon Mac to yellow and then to red memory pressure, and in yellow they didn't notice any difference in responsiveness. Actual test of responsiveness when memory is under stress is what makes me believe an argument - not a theoretical sentence which might as well be false. Needs to be real.
No, it wont 🤦♂️. This isnt system 6/Mac SE days, and this isnt an iphone pausing most background functions without entitlements on userland apps. Backgrounded or off focus applications are still running apps on a mac, memory they’re using is part of the wired grouping.
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