I start suspecting that @Mity is having some little innocent fun with us here. It is difficult for me to imagine that a person working with data science still wouldn't get the idea of how RAM works on Apple Silicon after two pages of explanations.
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M3 Max MBP Excessive RAM Utilization
- Thread starter Mity
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This is hilarious. I’m with leman, they have to be trolling… surely they can’t be a dev without understanding how OSs use RAM.
You're adorable.
I surely hope so! 🤓
Your computer does not know that having unused memory is important to you. It will fill it up as best as it can to make things faster. This is a good thing.
Look up changes from ios15, lot of those changes apply to M1 and above. Code diff won’t do much good, your best bet is to look at documentation from old unused forks of XNU and compare to latest releases.
Apple does a good job documenting, here is a good start.
xnu/doc/vm/freezer.md at main · apple-oss-distributions/xnu
Contribute to apple-oss-distributions/xnu development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
This explains how ARM 64 and Intel manage hibernation/sleep. You can find differences below.
xnu/doc/lifecycle/hibernation.md at main · apple-oss-distributions/xnu
Contribute to apple-oss-distributions/xnu development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
I would be curious to see your findings, if you can pinpoint to some specific major changes.
This is surely a troll. Do you really not understand how macOS (or any Apple OS) ram utilisation works?
What about dem cores. I don’t need all those cores now, just future proofing. Why is Mac using multiple cores?
Prime example of someone who has all the gear but no idea…
My new base M1 MBA ($699 - thanks Walmart!) just absolutely flies. (It's about 3 weeks old, so I think it's done indexing.) This screenshot is toward the end of the workday, but most of the time I don't shut things down - I just close the lid till the next day.
I am not trolling. The questions I did have about dynamic allocation, no one really answered and instead, and actually accused me of baiting??? Weird.
Responses have been tantamount to, "just focus on memory pressure." While that's a very simplified way of looking at it, it doesn't really give me a metric to rely on, especially if I want to avoid swap, which I deliberately did with my x86 MBP.
For example, on my M1 MBA, I have 12.23GB used out of 16GB. The percentage of total RAM utilization is high. Can we agree on this?
Now, going back to the M3 Max machine, if simply looking at memory used is incorrect because we expect to change as more apps are used, then what metric can I use besides the color coded memory pressure?
From your experience using an M1 or M2 Max, how does this change? Have you utilized swap and at what percentage does that usually happen?
Again, I have no way of knowing this except asking people that have actually used an M1 or M2 Max. My only experience with Apple Silicon has been an M1 MBA. So, I think I rightly should compare behavior of my M3 Max with my older x86 machine.
The question "how much RAM is my Mac using" just doesn't have a simple answer.
To be fair, no one knows the actually answer of the M3 Dynamic Caching. Not even Apple can explain it. The Verge, Macrumors, Digital Trend and even MKBHD never got a straight answer.
"Dynamic Caching allocates the use of local memory in hardware in real time. With Dynamic Caching, only the exact amount of memory needed is used for each task."
The assumption is, if you have Mx amount of RAM and an app requires Mx3 amount of RAM, MacOS+M3 will only allocate Mx3 an not any further.
Apple unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, the most advanced chips for a personal computer
M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max feature groundbreaking technologies that deliver dramatically increased performance and unleash new capabilities for Mac.
www.apple.com
Aha. I think we have found the real barrier to using your machine to its fullest potential
What metric do you use to know if your HDD controller is storing bits in the “correct” sector? (Or SSD block)
The answer is that you don’t care, because the system manages those things for you. Modern computers treat RAM the same way. It’s a resource to be used. There is nothing you can do to change the way your system manages it.
Obviously, this concerns you, so you bought a lot of RAM. Chances are that you purchased much more than the minimum your workflow would require. I bet you’d be fine with 32GB and probably less. But as long as you’ve got the money, buy as much as you want, then let the machine work for you. Obsessively watching Activity Monitor is not going to make things better.
If you truly want to avoid swap, turn it off. Just Google "macos disable swap". Just don't cry when your processes are unceremoniously killed and you have kernel panics... but w/ 128GB memory, you probably won't... maybe?
Apple sells 192 GB Mac Studio, may be worth a look for OP.
Why did you crop the screen shorts like that? What included in Memory Used section? App Memory? Wired Memory? Compressed? I suspect that Wired Memory might be high due to GPU usage? If you really want help you should be less suspicious.
Hey OP, don’t worry about RAM. You have literally zero swapped memory. Even if you bought 192GB of RAM, you would still see a big chunk used. Because RAM is there for the system to use it. But don’t worry, that’s totally fine, and with 128GB you’re good for 5 years or, probably, even more.
I don't understand why you care. Really, what difference does it make? Your machine is only going to slow down if it is really running out of memory. Since you are at the top of the available memory configurations there's nothing you could do about it other than close some applications.
Why is it using swap? Because the operating system wants to use RAM for useful things. If it determines the memory isn't being used effectively it will move other stuff out of RAM into swap. Then use RAM for useful things like file system cache. Unused memory is wasted memory. There's no reason not to fill it up. As memory pressure goes up the O.S. will start to evict less used things out of memory. It's designed to do that.
Here's a screenshot of my M3 Max. It's using a little swap even though almost half the memory is being used for file system cache. If that stuff in swap was actually being used it would be brought into RAM.
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The real question that was asked earlier and never answered is this: does your computer have any unexpected slowdowns? If not, move on. 128 GB of RAM will be plenty for many years to come. If you really need more than that, a laptop isn't the answer.
Also, if you stop watching Activity Monitor, does your computer's RAM handling stop causing concern? In other words, is there actually a problem or is there just a perception of a problem?
Also, if you stop watching Activity Monitor, does your computer's RAM handling stop causing concern? In other words, is there actually a problem or is there just a perception of a problem?
To be fair, if the RAM pressure was in red and a huge swap file, even if the computer worked fine (because the SSDs are really fast nowadays), he would be degrading the SSD pretty quickly. But this is definitely not the case, so he should just stop looking at the RAM usage.
You need to get one of those 7,1 Mac Pros from iPowerresale with a W3275M and upgrade it to 1.5TB, problem solved.
(bwahaha).Joking aside (and please people don't get all upset and cranky), I wouldn't worry about the memory usage, if the machine is running well and not lagging or crashing then no problem.
This is my machine at the moment, the 7,1 in my signature:
I've only got the base amount of RAM on this machine and it never has any dramas.
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