Memory status on M1 MBP - is this normal for 8Gig version?

[nph]

I just looked at the memory pressure status with my normal set of apps open, slightly less actually and this is how it looks.
If I upgraded to the 16gig RAM version would I see a different picture?
Even though it shows yellow for memory pressure I haven't noticed any slowdowns.
Having used the 8 Gig M1 for a year I am thinking about upgrading to 16 gig but question is would I see a big difference or is M1 handling low memory situations quite good?

 

[chabig]

I think Macs handle memory very well, which you've observed. If you upgraded to 16GB, I'm sure your memory pressure would be lower with the same apps open, but since you're not experiencing any negative effects it's probably not worth the money to do so. Periodically closing some of those Safari tabs will reclaim memory too.

 

[Krevnik]

Memory Pressure is a bit like a temp gauge on a car. It’s useful, but it can sometimes be hard to read, which is why so many cars have gone to a simple “overtemp” light instead.

As long as you aren’t expecting to change your use much, yellow memory pressure isn’t the end of the world. You’ll deal with some extra wear on the SSD from the swap use, but as long as it is performing well, you’ll probably be fine. I wouldn’t upgrade just because of yellow memory pressure. That said, I would take it as a sign that perhaps I should consider the next step up when it is time to upgrade in the future.

 

[Tagbert]

A lot of what is taking up your RAM are web pages. It is a different discussion about how and why so many web pages are such hogs. On the bright side, it is very each for the system to swap those out of active RAM with very little performance impact. You would mainly run into problems if you were running apps with single large data sets what could not be swapped.

If you are not running to the red zone on a regular basis I think you are doing fine.

FYI - there seems to be a memory leak or something that sometimes causes the system to pop up a notice that you are out of memory. When that happens you will often see several apps with GBs or RAM allocated. Hopefully we will see an OS fix for that in the near future.

 

[pshufd]

I have a 16 GB mini and was just running office stuff on it with most of my web pages on a Windows desktop. I was using 11 GB of RAM for the programs and the rest for cache and maybe 100 MB of swap. Performance was fine. If you got the 16 with your workload, swap would go to zero or almost zero and your Cached Files would go up a lot.

I've just disconnected my Windows Desktop and replacing the Windows Desktop with M1 mini with the M1 mini and my M1 PRO MacBook Pro 16 with 32 GB of RAM. The MacBook Pro is currently using 13 GB with 13 GB cached and 0 Swap but it doesn't have my Firefox tabs loaded up yet. 32 GB looks like a good fit for this system. It does seem a bit high and I wonder if I am seeing the VM leak problem.

 

[VitoBotta]

I originally bought the 8GB M1 mini and had constant high memory pressure issues with the apps I normally use for web development. I passed that to my wife and got the 16GB for myself and it's a lot better. I keep many things running so sometimes it still happens a little but it doesn't cause any problems.