RAM issue - Is 8GB enough?

[lifeonsmithlake]

There must be some other issue with your Air. Apple says 2GB RAM is the bare minimum for Mojave. I will say it again: 4GB RAM is adequate, 8GB is lots, and 16GB is overkill. MacOS manages its memory very efficiently. Especially on an SSD Mac like your Air. Check your Console log to see if any process is out of control, and run Activity Monitor and keep an eye on your memory pressure. Right now on my Late-2012 iMac I'm running Finder, Dropbox, Sync, Safari (3 tabs), Mail, Messages, Tweetbot, iTunes, Activity Monitor, and Photos -- using less than 8GB in total -- and my system is running like a dream. If your new 8GB Air is choking under load of one email then something is seriously wrong with your MacOS installation.

It's been sluggish at times since updating to Mojave, but the real problems started with a download of Adobe Acrobat DC. Not sure why. Apple Tech X 2 over the past 2 days has got me running smoothly again with a SAFE MODE start to clear the cache. But they couldn't tell me what was going on. They both came onto the unit but did not see anything that appears to be wrong. I'm loving coming back to Mac after 20+ years with Windows computers (due to work). Owned one of the 1st Apple 2e and MacIntosh desktops and loved them. Just got comfortable with the operating system differences and now this. A drag, but will figure out. Thanks for the quick reply to help.

 

[Mokus76]

8Gig will be fine.... usually you can install OS's with with only 2 or 4 Gig. so 8 Gig will last a long time if you don't do editing.. and won't slow it down unless u run out of storage space... so SSD's is where i'd spend the money on,, not ram.

Well I would disagree with the 8gb because I just got an 2017 5K iMac with 8gb RAM and I had the spinning wheel constantly and I just ordered and installed 32gb and now I have 40gb total and soon will go all the way to 64gb RAM. I checked activity monitor and since I have the 40gb installed, Mac OS, Safari, iTunes and Activity monitor was open and I was using 7.8gb out of the 40gb. So how is 8gb enough?? Apple should ship every Mac with at least 16gb because anything less is a joke and the computer runs slow and sluggish. My iMac now runs great, and remember too much ram doesn't exist especially today.

 

[phrehdd]

And MS Windows helped to break that 640K limit, as it was, among other things a "memory-management kludge" (I'd argue that, while it was a kludge because it ran on top of MS-DOS, the memory management aspect was good enough to justify the entire price of upgrading to Windows).

Going above 640 was easily done with products such as Pharlap. It was around during DOS and Windows 3x days. Some referred to it as a "DOS extender." In fact, worked with some folks who ran software that exploited that "DOS extender." Just an opinion - Windows didn't help break anything except competition at that time.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Well I would disagree with the 8gb because I just got an 2017 5K iMac with 8gb RAM and I had the spinning wheel constantly and I just ordered and installed 32gb and now I have 40gb total and soon will go all the way to 64gb RAM. I checked activity monitor and since I have the 40gb installed, Mac OS, Safari, iTunes and Activity monitor was open and I was using 7.8gb out of the 40gb. So how is 8gb enough?? Apple should ship every Mac with at least 16gb because anything less is a joke and the computer runs slow and sluggish. My iMac now runs great, and remember too much ram doesn't exist especially today.

So, 40 GB is still inadequate? What's pushing the move to 64 GB? Are you still getting beachballs? All you've mentioned is Safari, iTunes and Activity Monitor. There has to be more than that. Are you doing video production or climate modeling? If your tasks demand 64 GB, then you need 64 GB. I'm not going to argue that it's "too much" unless there's no logical reason to need that much.

But if Safari and iTunes was all you were doing with your Mac and 8 GB was consistently inadequate, then there was likely something wrong in software. Back when you had 8 GB, what was Activity Monitor telling you? Was Memory Pressure constantly in the orange/red? What processes were taking large percentages of RAM and CPU? If there was something wrong in software, adding RAM is like eating more food because you have a stomach parasite. Is it better to feed the parasite, or kill it?

Mac OS will use as much RAM as you throw at it - it's not just a matter of how much it currently needs, but also whether there's a need to flush out old stuff to make room for new. So when you have excess RAM capacity we can't assume that the 7.8 GB RAM you now see in Activity Monitor is the minimum needed to run macOS, Safari, iTunes, and Activity Monitor efficiently.

Bottom line for me is that if you are doing things that legitimately require 40 or 64 GB, but you tried to run them on 8 GB, you're in no position to judge whether 8 GB is enough for the average Mac user, for whom, in my experience, 8 GB is enough when all is working as it should. Of course 16 GB is nicer than 8 GB, but it's always been that way with computer configurations - computer makers are always going to offer a base RAM configuration that is adequate for typical browsing/email/word processing users, because selling them more than absolutely necessary raises prices, which chases away buyers. Considering how few complaints I see about the performance of new Macs, Apple's probably delivering just what those users need.

Going above 640 was easily done with products such as Pharlap. It was around during DOS and Windows 3x days. Some referred to it as a "DOS extender." In fact, worked with some folks who ran software that exploited that "DOS extender." Just an opinion - Windows didn't help break anything except competition at that time.

There's lots we could say about Microsoft. Of course there were a fair number of extended memory managers back in DOS days. Microsoft did not include that feature in MS-DOS, so until Windows came along, you needed a third-party solution. In my experience, utilization of EMMs was not particularly widespread, and plenty of apps were not written to take advantage of that memory, even when it was available.

The thing is, we're talking about a system architecture designed for a character-based, single-tasking OS. Trying to run a multi-tasking GUI on that configuration was insane. However, for Microsoft, it was a business necessity - they needed to retrofit as much of the installed PC base with Windows as possible if they were going to fight off Apple's hardware-plus-software competition. As long as your existing PC could be crammed with enough RAM, upgrading to Windows was far cheaper than buying a new Mac.

When system architecture evolved, OS-based extended memory management was no longer needed. For the time that it was needed, I'd still argue Windows was by far the widest-deployed EMM (although few were consciously buying it for that capability).

 

[phrehdd]

So, 40 GB is still inadequate? What's pushing the move to 64 GB? Are you still getting beachballs? All you've mentioned is Safari, iTunes and Activity Monitor. There has to be more than that. Are you doing video production or climate modeling? If your tasks demand 64 GB, then you need 64 GB. I'm not going to argue that it's "too much" unless there's no logical reason to need that much.

But if Safari and iTunes was all you were doing with your Mac and 8 GB was consistently inadequate, then there was likely something wrong in software. Back when you had 8 GB, what was Activity Monitor telling you? Was Memory Pressure constantly in the orange/red? What processes were taking large percentages of RAM and CPU? If there was something wrong in software, adding RAM is like eating more food because you have a stomach parasite. Is it better to feed the parasite, or kill it?

Mac OS will use as much RAM as you throw at it - it's not just a matter of how much it currently needs, but also whether there's a need to flush out old stuff to make room for new. So when you have excess RAM capacity we can't assume that the 7.8 GB RAM you now see in Activity Monitor is the minimum needed to run macOS, Safari, iTunes, and Activity Monitor efficiently.

Bottom line for me is that if you are doing things that legitimately require 40 or 64 GB, but you tried to run them on 8 GB, you're in no position to judge whether 8 GB is enough for the average Mac user, for whom, in my experience, 8 GB is enough when all is working as it should. Of course 16 GB is nicer than 8 GB, but it's always been that way with computer configurations - computer makers are always going to offer a base RAM configuration that is adequate for typical browsing/email/word processing users, because selling them more than absolutely necessary raises prices, which chases away buyers. Considering how few complaints I see about the performance of new Macs, Apple's probably delivering just what those users need.

There's lots we could say about Microsoft. Of course there were a fair number of extended memory managers back in DOS days. Microsoft did not include that feature in MS-DOS, so until Windows came along, you needed a third-party solution. In my experience, utilization of EMMs was not particularly widespread, and plenty of apps were not written to take advantage of that memory, even when it was available.

The thing is, we're talking about a system architecture designed for a character-based, single-tasking OS. Trying to run a multi-tasking GUI on that configuration was insane. However, for Microsoft, it was a business necessity - they needed to retrofit as much of the installed PC base with Windows as possible if they were going to fight off Apple's hardware-plus-software competition. As long as your existing PC could be crammed with enough RAM, upgrading to Windows was far cheaper than buying a new Mac.

When system architecture evolved, OS-based extended memory management was no longer needed. For the time that it was needed, I'd still argue Windows was by far the widest-deployed EMM (although few were consciously buying it for that capability).

There certainly were a few memory managers and later in the game, MS DOS had "memdos" or some command line that would do a moderate move and bookkeeping about the line. As for Win3.x it certainly was not a multi-tasker by any means. Run one app and go to the next, the first app would "pause" while you were in the second app. Microsoft can say what they like but items like Desqview were closer to slicing up time to apps under DOS in a far superior manner to Windows. Other computers were superior to PCs where handling several tasks at once or "open" was concerned including the Commodore 64. Reality remains that Microsoft simply did better marketing, resorted to lies to promote product and monopolistic practices. "Better" or "superior" does not always win out in the end. Microsoft is a perfect proof of this.