Actually, most of the work can be done on the Internet these days, and apps too, so 8GB might be quite enough with Safari knowing how to put unused at given moment tabs to sleep. If you are using memory extensive, energy eating apps, you might need 16GB, but more than that is just marketing. 32GB is quite normal these days, but then you should get a desktop with good air circulation, not a confined MacBook, that is, if you are asking the computer to do heavy work.
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M3 Max MBP Excessive RAM Utilization
- Thread starter Mity
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When we were using SATA 3.0 6Gps drives, of course, you wanted to avoid swapping. Then, the whole system could be paused for a bit. Now, it's much faster.
People have to learn the system and not just assume that things work the way the older systems worked.
Applications vary. Running 30 or so right now, including Final Cut Pro X and Photoshop with ~26%, ~57GB of memory in use. Have one backup program which eventually soaks up all of my memory causing the "run out of application memory" message. The offending program is killed (by the system?) and respawned when I'm not there. See the message when I return, usually overnight. Happens 2 or 3 times a day.
Interesting how you keep an eye on all 30 running apps at a given moment?
Or, is it that some are working in the background without supervision, and/or some apps are just sleeping?
Actual running apps which I am interacting with are maybe 5. There are also server (Plex, Roon, ...) and utility apps (such as Little Snitch, Fing, Sophos, ...) which are running constantly.
If you are using such apps, you'd need a lot of RAM, as they are memory eating apps, practically unnecessary on a Mac...
If they are dormant in the background, not so much. If the active memory/including cache isn’t enough, you need more RAM.
I’m reading your responses, and I’m going to do my best to be polite.
You are blowing up without seeing any other variable, isolating a single item.
Memory management is a very very liquid thing.
This is like saying you drove down highway X and it took you Y time to get to work. But the next time you went down highway X and it took you Z to get to work THATS OUTRAGEOUS!
Apple Silicon being a Unified Memory Architecture, as they keep reminding us means that for things like playing your 8K videos will take more memory. Especially when running in Chrome.
An App uses 10gb on 16Gb of RAM.
Same app uses 15gb on 32Gb of RAM. The why?
It is the wonder of Dynamic Allocation usage we are in the dark about I believe and where is it that the OS knows
to grab more empty RAM and allocates Empty RAM to that App.
And the App allocation gets larger as you go up in physical RAM in Gb`s.
Mystery of Apple.
Same app uses 15gb on 32Gb of RAM. The why?
It is the wonder of Dynamic Allocation usage we are in the dark about I believe and where is it that the OS knows
to grab more empty RAM and allocates Empty RAM to that App.
And the App allocation gets larger as you go up in physical RAM in Gb`s.
Mystery of Apple.
This is not happening. There is no automatic "grabbing of empty RAM". This all depends on how the app is written.
Wait, I'm trying to figure out why you need these programs exactly:
Little Snitch is a firewall program that alerts you whenever a connection is made to the internet. (https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html)
Fing sounds like the same thing as Little Snitch. (https://www.fing.com/)
I'm not sure what you're referring to by Sophos, since that's a company and not a product. But the company does provide cyber security (https://www.sophos.com/en-us )
Why so many software firewalls, and why not use the firewall that's included with MacOS? Running multiple software firewalls is just asking for trouble in my opinion.
For the servers that you're running..
Plex is a streaming service. (source: https://www.plex.tv/ ) I never used it myself, and I'm not familiar with it at all. But servers do use a lot of RAM.
Soon sounds like Plex, except for music (source: https://roon.app/en/ ). Again, I never heard of it, and I never used it, but the more connections you have to the server, the more RAM you need.
It sounds like you have other servers and utility apps, because of the (...). My advice:
1. Get a separate Macintosh/ Computer whose sole purpose is to be a headless server connected to a couple of hard drives. Set it up, put it in a closet, and forget about it.
2. It sounds like security is important to you. Get a hardware based firewall. It can either be another computer (separate from the server you have), or a specialized device that is just a firewall. If it's a specialized device, get something like this: https://www.firewalls.com/fortinet-fortigate-40f-hardware-only.html Otherwise, get a cheap Linux box. Sophos sells firewalls too.
It'll reduce your computer's RAM usage, and you'd keep your network more secure.
Totally different, although there is some overlap. Little Snitch monitors app network connections. Fing monitors device ip and mac addresses which helps in diagnosing network problems. Have ~30 devices on-line at one time and sometimes need to quickly find MAC or IP addresses (removed from image here):
Sorry wasn't clear. Talking about their virus/malware etc. product "Sophos Home Premium" which people just refer to as "Sophos".
It is a very controversial topic about whether the included firewall is sufficient. People are pretty entrenched in their positions. I agree with:
Despite the misconception that Macs are immune to malware, mobile threats, especially on platforms like iOS, are genuine and challenging to quantify with simple statistics.
https://www.jamf.com/resources/white-papers/security-360-annual-trends-report/
Just as I have multiple backups I also have multiple security services. Yes, does sometimes cause problems.
I have one, a Cisco RV340 which handles my gigabit connection. It unfortunately has been discontinued. Thanks for the reference. They look expensive so hope the RV340 doesn't fail again.
Appreciate your comments but I don't have a ram issue, other than that one case. Running just fine now with ~75 GB in use.
Just for grins, here's my very first Apple Silicon machine. I bought one of the early M1 minis to try out the ARM architecture, before committing to it wholesale. It's just a base M1, 16 GB, 8 cores (4 and 4). It still runs my entire workload well. The memory pressure is yellow consistently, but until this thread I never thought to even check it because I really haven't had any problems.
I'm planning to replace it with (most likely) the next generation studio that comes out either this fall or next spring, and then this one will become a file server.
If you'd look in System Settings > Login items > and disable and delete all that's there, so no 3rd party app start at login and would run in the background without your knowledge, you might even down some of the RAM usage. Then reboot your Mac. With the same work load, you might even find the memory pressure in the green area.
Nothing at all.
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I see you are deep into the Microsoft ecosystem, most of their apps consume a lot of RAM, but it's okay since you doing a bit of swap
16GB is fine for most people tbh even if you hitting yellow you get some swap which is normal
Why would Plex need a lot of RAM? On a NAS it runs just fine on Linux in 1GB.
The same MS apps won't take that much RAM in Windows, as there won't be those additional 'helper' apps running in the background in the non-dedicated OS, eating up Ram.
Yep I know here's mine for example...
I'm not connected to any external display right now hence the memory in green, but you can see how many helpers there are..
I'll be stunned if a person DOESN'T have a NAT router :O
But NATs aren't firewalls, they are completely different concepts.
Sure, but if your computer is behind a NAT router then it can't be addressed from the internet. Nobody can directly send traffic to it unless it's on a connection that originated from the inside. Only the router has an IP address reachable from the outside. Why do you need to filter incoming traffic if it can't even reach your computer?
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