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Is my RAM maxed out?

E

eN0ch

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 28, 2009
71
4
Crookwell NSW Australia
I have a M1 iMac a bit over a year old, now. I bought it at a time when the HDD in my previous iMac (2013 27") had gone belly-up very suddenly. It wasn't an option to wait several weeks for the 'perfect' computer, so it had to be a base-ish model. (512GB drive, when I'd have preferred 1TB; 8GB RAM, not 16). On my research at the time, plus past experience, I concluded I'd be safe with 8GB RAM for my usage. I don't have high powered multimedia apps, for instance.

I'm now wondering if I may have unknowingly saddled myself with a memory-poor system (which of course isn't upgradeable). From stuff I've read more recently I'm getting the impression that picking the right RAM config in a Silicon mac may be even less of an exact science than it was with Intel. And/or that these M- chips don't spare the horses when it comes to RAM usage. Can anyone more knowledgable confirm on these impressions?

Well anyway I've been getting a plethora of weird workflow-killing distractions over several months. I'm sure I'll forget some of them, but here are those I can remember:
  • frequent crashes / hangs / beachballs with normally very stable core apps, most notably:
    • web browsers (various; and I don't generally keep a lot of tabs or windows open either)
    • Hazel (when running complex file management automation actions)
  • whole system crashes (possibly kernel panics, but hard to be sure ... I saw the word "kernel" in an incomprehensible screen message one time)
  • memory pressure nearly always in the yellow zone in Activity Monitor
  • weird disk permissions dramas on restart
  • failed attempts at running First Aid on my data volume
    • 'failed' as in 'couldn't be repaired' and warnings suggesting impending disk failure
    • but then the next time I try (days or weeks later) First Aid runs like a dream
  • twice in the process of a system crash, the TM backup data on my brand new 2TB APFS-formatted ext SSD has been fried
    • as in unmountable (never mind unreadable), unrevivable, data unrecoverable, "this is an ex-parrot"
    • only solution being erase and start again, losing 30+ TM snapshots
  • problems continue after erase - reinstall - restore data
  • and yet with all this going on, CleanMyMac X, Etrecheck Pro and DriveDx say it's all good 🤯🤔🤷
I think that covers it well enough. Possible causes I've managed to identify (NB: I'm a noob) - Spotlight indexing, malware, hardware failure, RAM maxed out. RAM is looking more and more like the culprit to my untrained brain. But I could be way off the mark???

Hoping there might be some informed expertise on this forum, for diagnosis and solutions. Please ... 🙏🙏
 
The worst of those symptoms could be caused by almost anything, from failing RAM, to failing disk, to things like cable or connector issues. It could also be there's more than one underlying problem, or an intermittent one.

If you haven't run Apple's hardware diagnostics, you probably should:

Use Apple Diagnostics to test your Mac - Apple Support

Apple Diagnostics, formerly known as Apple Hardware Test, can check your Mac for hardware issues.
support.apple.com support.apple.com

Diagnose problems on Mac

If your Mac doesn’t start up using macOS, try using Apple Diagnostics.
support.apple.com

You might also take it in to an Apple store for more extensive testing.
 
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Sounds like you have much bigger problem then maxed out ram. Memory pressure being yellow shouldn’t cause the problems you have posted.
 
I concur with the other posters. Essentially the only symptoms you list which could be the consequence of yellow-level memory pressure is slowness and/or the occasional temporary beachball. You definitely could use more RAM, but you've got some other problem going on for sure.
 
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chown33 said:
If you haven't run Apple's hardware diagnostics, you probably should:
Click to expand...
Did that a couple of weeks back. Same result as CleanMyMac X, Etrecheck Pro and DriveDx - i.e. no problems identified
chown33 said:
You might also take it in to an Apple store for more extensive testing.
Click to expand...
Thanks. Yes I had thought of that (or opening a support ticket with Apple).
 
Might be a good time to update the story....

I've opened a support ticket with Apple, but hadn't progressed very far with that when the following came to light:

I raised what I assumed was a separate issue in another post. That led to some tips about TCC (more noob fun). Since deleting TCC.db, it's like I have a new computer! Back to the stability and performance one should expect. Not completely free of some of the earlier issues yet, but hoping that will change after a reinstall. (I'm away from home another week, so can't attend to that just yet).
 
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