MBP 14 ram usage issues, please help

[Memolomazo]

I just got a new MBP 14 10c 16gpu 16gb ram 1tb ssd.
I tried to run some massive ableton live projects (180 tracks with effects and 5 sends) and I was changing between projects and some of them gave me some performance problems (more related to the old ass plugins I use which are not optimized for m1, and my ableton is running on Roseta)

ableton is using 28gb of ram but the real memory usage is 13gb and the swap memory is just 380mb.

My question is… why? Memory pressure is low, memory usage is just correct, memory swap is low but ableton is using more ram than I have.

My older windows laptop had 32gb of ram but I did that upgrade of ram in the older laptop only because ableton used to crash a lot when I closed huge projects.
Should I return this one and buy the 32gb model? Are 32gb necessary for my tasks since the memory usage is like this?

 

[mr_roboto]

I just got a new MBP 14 10c 16gpu 16gb ram 1tb ssd.
I tried to run some massive ableton live projects (180 tracks with effects and 5 sends) and I was changing between projects and some of them gave me some performance problems (more related to the old ass plugins I use which are not optimized for m1, and my ableton is running on Roseta)

ableton is using 28gb of ram but the real memory usage is 13gb and the swap memory is just 380mb.

My question is… why? Memory pressure is low, memory usage is just correct, memory swap is low but ableton is using more ram than I have.

My older windows laptop had 32gb of ram but I did that upgrade of ram in the older laptop only because ableton used to crash a lot when I closed huge projects.
Should I return this one and buy the 32gb model? Are 32gb necessary for my tasks since the memory usage is like this?

Look again - you have nearly 8GB of compressed memory. Compressed memory is a form of swapping Apple added a few macOS releases ago. When under memory pressure, instead of always writing data out to a swapfile, macOS tries to compress it instead. When the process owning that memory tries to use it, it has to be decompressed.

So the true picture is that you have many gigabytes of "swap", and the computer is probably on the edge of needing to write a lot of data out to disk. This is why it's showing medium memory pressure (green is low, yellow is medium).

Compressing and decompressing should be faster than swapping to disk, but still nowhere near as good as physical memory. You probably should return it for the 32GB model.

Also, apparently Ableton has a beta out which is native on Apple Silicon. That might help.


P.S. a tip about taking screenshots on the Mac - you didn't need to get out your camera! Command-Shift-3 instantly screenshots the whole display. Command-Shift-4 changes your mouse cursor to crosshairs, which you can use to select a rectangle of the screen. You can also press the spacebar after command-shift-4 to go into an alternate mode where you just click one window and it makes an image of that window and nothing else.

 

[wilberforce]

This looks like you could benefit from more RAM, as it would actually be used. However, you may not see much performance improvement, which sounds like a paradox but isn't.
If I were you, I would exchange for 32GB RAM, not because I would expect it to solve performance problems, but because your workflow definitely appears to have high memory demands and this is only likely to increase in the future.

 

[Memolomazo]

Thanks for your answers. I guess I’ll need 32gb of ram, as I used to have on windows. Sadly 3200€ is a price kinda high for a Mac that it’s focused only in professional tasks so I guess I’ll pass this time of apple

 

[JohnHerzog]

I just got a new MBP 14 10c 16gpu 16gb ram 1tb ssd.
I tried to run some massive ableton live projects (180 tracks with effects and 5 sends) and I was changing between projects and some of them gave me some performance problems (more related to the old ass plugins I use which are not optimized for m1, and my ableton is running on Roseta)

ableton is using 28gb of ram but the real memory usage is 13gb and the swap memory is just 380mb.

My question is… why? Memory pressure is low, memory usage is just correct, memory swap is low but ableton is using more ram than I have.

My older windows laptop had 32gb of ram but I did that upgrade of ram in the older laptop only because ableton used to crash a lot when I closed huge projects.
Should I return this one and buy the 32gb model? Are 32gb necessary for my tasks since the memory usage is like this?

YES! Get the 32GB model.