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When 16GB RAM is not enough?

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yurkennis

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 1, 2010
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Anyone experienced that 16GB RAM is not enough on M1 Macbook?
What is your usage scenario when 16GB is a bottleneck?

Thinking whether going 16GB instead of 32GB is an option for me once M1X-based Macbooks are released.
Too hard to think in advance what can become a bottleneck for me.
Currently happy with 72GB iMac (Intel), but I was fine with 40GB on it, M1 is different from Intel, and Macbook will be secondary machine after all.
 
Not yet on my Mac mini. and I could have the following open at the same time.
Final Cut Pro,Logic Pro,Browser with tons of tabs,Photos,Lightroom,Books,Amazon Music, a bunch of terminals, and other miscellaneous programs.

M1 changes the way memory is handled that's for sure.
 
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I’m sure there are workloads that require more than 16Gb.

For those one needs patience and money when Apple release their new products later on in 2021.

Patience
giphy.gif
 
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Will do some more stress testing on my partners M1, as my desktop has 64gb but usually 32gb is ok for me on that.

But I am thinking 32gb on the secondary M1 14/16” when it comes out, and 16gb on a tertiary home MBA.
better to have room than no room is my principle.
 
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yurkennis said:
Anyone experienced that 16GB RAM is not enough on M1 Macbook?
What is your usage scenario when 16GB is a bottleneck?

Thinking whether going 16GB instead of 32GB is an option for me once M1X-based Macbooks are released.
Too hard to think in advance what can become a bottleneck for me.
Currently happy with 72GB iMac (Intel), but I was fine with 40GB on it, M1 is different from Intel, and Macbook will be secondary machine after all.
Click to expand...

It seems that memory is needed in most cases of content creation. Adobe Lightroom and some video editors can use all the RAM you can give them. Also, virtual machines need RAM, but you might never have reason to use a VM with Apple M1.

On the other hand for media viewing such as web browsing, youtube, and such, 8GB is enough.

I really don't think it matters much between the Intel and Arm CPUs. Many studies show the code density is about the same and of course the data are exactly the same. The very fast SSD storage makes the new M1 Macs seem very fast but if scrolling through 1,500 preview images on Lightroom you want all the RAM cache you can get
 
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If your workflow requires more than 16gb RAM, probably best to stay away from the two bottom tier M1s being offered. That said, in 3 weeks of full stack web support and development, my memory pressure has never gone over 40%.
 
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No issues or setbacks yet for Office 365, Zoom meeting, Safari tabs ( some footages simultaneously).

But a beach ball appeared when I synced OneDrive for the first time, memory pressure was not high then though.
 
I imagine the people who would benefit significantly or find it hard to live with 16GB for the next 2-3 years would be in the minority.
Dundundun said:
No issues or setbacks yet for Office 365, Zoom meeting, Safari tabs ( some footages simultaneously).

But a beach ball appeared when I synced OneDrive for the first time, memory pressure was not high then though.
Click to expand...
This kind of thing is usually due to drivers with some type of busy waiting involved. It should only happen with memory if your machine has to swap many pages in a short period of time.
 
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ChrisA said:
It seems that memory is needed in most cases of content creation. Adobe Lightroom and some video editors can use all the RAM you can give them. Also, virtual machines need RAM, but you might never have reason to use a VM with Apple M1.

On the other hand for media viewing such as web browsing, youtube, and such, 8GB is enough.

I really don't think it matters much between the Intel and Arm CPUs. Many studies show the code density is about the same and of course the data are exactly the same. The very fast SSD storage makes the new M1 Macs seem very fast but if scrolling through 1,500 preview images on Lightroom you want all the RAM cache you can get
Click to expand...
There is a difference between a program using up as much memory as possible and requiring that much memory. I basically wasted $500 due to this "more memory = better" line of thinking when I upgraded my iMac to 128GB of RAM after market. I only work on 1080p video. Yes, Adobe After Effects still takes up 110GB of the RAM (since that is the max I set in preferences), but working on 1080p video doesn't require 128GB of RAM. And honestly, it really wasn't much different than 8GB of RAM - only a few seconds. I had to get certified for video editing and the lecturers/professors all stated that 8GB was enough for 1080p video editing. Shocked by this I put the original 8GB back in my Mac and sure enough, it was good enough. Only took ~30 seconds more to export a 15+ minute project and the editing experience was just as good.
 
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xWhiplash said:
There is a difference between a program using up as much memory as possible and requiring that much memory. I basically wasted $500 due to this "more memory = better" line of thinking when I upgraded my iMac to 128GB of RAM after market. I only work on 1080p video. Yes, Adobe After Effects still takes up 110GB of the RAM (since that is the max I set in preferences), but working on 1080p video doesn't require 128GB of RAM. And honestly, it really wasn't much different than 8GB of RAM - only a few seconds. I had to get certified for video editing and the lecturers/professors all stated that 8GB was enough for 1080p video editing. Shocked by this I put the original 8GB back in my Mac and sure enough, it was good enough. Only took ~30 seconds more to export a 15+ minute project and the editing experience was just as good.
Click to expand...

Upgrading to 128gb is an extreme example, of course.

More memory IS better - but like with many other things, after a certain point (call it "more than enough") the net marginal benefit approaches zero.

And before that "more than enough" point, there is some benefit as well, but less and less.

Where exactly that point is depends on workflow and usage as well as speed of the supporting systems like swap (or from the other side, the penalty of swap declines as the system is faster).

To each their own: I know from experience 4gb is not-quite-enough for normal simple web-browsing and mail, etc (manageable but a bit of a pain, forays into yellow memory pressure if not a bit careful), really painful for heavier use (red memory pressure, massive slowdowns); 8gb is close-to-enough for slightly heavier use, but slowdowns noticeable and annoying for eg photography; 16gb fine for most of my uses, slowdowns/memory issues infrequent even under heavier use; 24gb still a noticeable improvement and removes vast majority of memory shortage and swapping; 32gb for me is basically already at the "more than enough" level, cases where noticeably improved over 24gb are extremely rare.

(Do not have M1 mac yet but I personally do NOT expect this will change the memory needed for my use cases - but everything will be faster esp swap so 16gb in a laptop will be more than enough. More would be better but not enough for me to pay Apple memory premium.)
 
yurkennis said:
Anyone experienced that 16GB RAM is not enough on M1 Macbook?
What is your usage scenario when 16GB is a bottleneck?

Thinking whether going 16GB instead of 32GB is an option for me once M1X-based Macbooks are released.
Too hard to think in advance what can become a bottleneck for me.
Currently happy with 72GB iMac (Intel), but I was fine with 40GB on it, M1 is different from Intel, and Macbook will be secondary machine after all.
Click to expand...
You can't upgrade it after the fact. Plus, Apple inevitably raises their minimum RAM requirements on things (as is usually the reason why iOS and iPadOS version upgrades leave older devices out in the cold). If it's a $400 difference, then maybe reconsider. But the cost difference is $200. Worst case scenario, you buy more RAM and then find that you're not paging to disk as much. I wouldn't get 8GB stock on anything that wasn't being used only for basic purposes in 2020. Plus the myth that Apple Silicon means you need less RAM is a myth. Apple Silicon uses RAM more efficiently, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you need less of it.
 
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You also have do distinguish what needs to be in RAM and what can as well be paged to a fast SSD.

Code that is executed you usually need to have in RAM because it needs the fast access time and low latency. In most cases assets, like the actual photo you are working on, might as well be in swap if you have a fast SSD because it is just an asset that has to be read and don’t actually depends that much on fast changes to it’s data (assuming you do non destructive editing which puts everything in layers on top of the original).

Hard to explain but I hope some of you understand what I mean.
 
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I am an academic teacher. Recently I changed my MacBook pro with Intel CPU from 2017 to MBA M1 with 16gb of RAM. Just now I finished my classes, conducted in the MS Teams - everything worked incredibly smoothly. In the background, there was an open bunch of applications - outlook, safari with 38 tabs, 2 powerpoint presentations, a pdf file, and some more applications. The temperature was about 27 degrees Celsius, CPU was 18% and the usage of the RAM was about 50%. This was not possible when I was using MBP from 2017 with 8 GB RAM and Intel CPU. Amazing performance Apple Good Job!
 
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Spindel said:
You also have do distinguish what needs to be in RAM and what can as well be paged to a fast SSD.

Code that is executed you usually need to have in RAM because it needs the fast access time and low latency. In most cases assets, like the actual photo you are working on, might as well be in swap if you have a fast SSD because it is just an asset that has to be read and don’t actually depends that much on fast changes to it’s data (assuming you do non destructive editing which puts everything in layers on top of the original).

Hard to explain but I hope some of you understand what I mean.
Click to expand...

You are suggesting that the hardware does significantly more work than it needs to.

Reading from the SSD any time you need a piece of an image is not particularly efficient if you can avoid it. Latency still matters there. Instruction data is typically smaller, because it often executes the same sequences of instructions multiple times.

Second, "non-destructive" doesn't mean you aren't saving a copy of those final pixel values. The way the term is usually used in image processing software, it means that you're saving the original values and a representation of any adjustment, presumably in the form of adjustment parameters and an alpha channel. You would still write the final pixel values with all adjustments applied somewhere, because otherwise you have to recompute everything every time and adjustment is made.

If this is a stack of layers (common approach from the ui perspective) and you generally work on the topmost layer, you would just be recomputing constant data and shuffling a lot of data around for the privilege of doing so. Handing it off to the gpu doesn't really make that more practical. It still increases the energy consumption of your machine and potentially lowers sustainable framerates.
 
xWhiplash said:
There is a difference between a program using up as much memory as possible and requiring that much memory. I basically wasted $500 due to this "more memory = better" line of thinking when I upgraded my iMac to 128GB of RAM after market. I only work on 1080p video. Yes, Adobe After Effects still takes up 110GB of the RAM (since that is the max I set in preferences), but working on 1080p video doesn't require 128GB of RAM. And honestly, it really wasn't much different than 8GB of RAM - only a few seconds. I had to get certified for video editing and the lecturers/professors all stated that 8GB was enough for 1080p video editing. Shocked by this I put the original 8GB back in my Mac and sure enough, it was good enough. Only took ~30 seconds more to export a 15+ minute project and the editing experience was just as good.
Click to expand...
^This.

I recall some tests (from MaxTech on YouTube and Puget Systems) that showed very little improvement in video editing performance in Davinci Resolve and Premiere Pro beyond 32GB RAM or 16-cores.

Video RAM was important though, and high-resolution video (6K, 8K) benefitted from large amounts of VRAM.
 
thekev said:
You are suggesting that the hardware does significantly more work than it needs to.

Reading from the SSD any time you need a piece of an image is not particularly efficient if you can avoid it. Latency still matters there. Instruction data is typically smaller, because it often executes the same sequences of instructions multiple times.

Second, "non-destructive" doesn't mean you aren't saving a copy of those final pixel values. The way the term is usually used in image processing software, it means that you're saving the original values and a representation of any adjustment, presumably in the form of adjustment parameters and an alpha channel. You would still write the final pixel values with all adjustments applied somewhere, because otherwise you have to recompute everything every time and adjustment is made.

If this is a stack of layers (common approach from the ui perspective) and you generally work on the topmost layer, you would just be recomputing constant data and shuffling a lot of data around for the privilege of doing so. Handing it off to the gpu doesn't really make that more practical. It still increases the energy consumption of your machine and potentially lowers sustainable framerates.
Click to expand...
Sorry bad example then.

But the point I'm tryin to make is that not all data a computer is working on needs high speed access and low latency. It works very well to dump to a SSD if said SSD has a high speed interface.

Another example is in a web browser, when browsing normal webpages, only a tiny portion "needs" to reside in RAM, mainly the code witch do not take up that much space, all the graphical elements that basically only displays can as well reside on a swap without the user noticing any performance penalty.
 
Spindel said:
Another example is in a web browser, when browsing normal webpages, only a tiny portion "needs" to reside in RAM, mainly the code witch do not take up that much space, all the graphical elements that basically only displays can as well reside on a swap without the user noticing any performance penalty.
Click to expand...

That's actually a bit more realistic, but it still contains the assumption that you look one place for some elements and another place for others. More conventional designs treat is as a hierarchy outside of special cases such as memory mapping of files and non-temporal references, which issue prefetching from virtual memory without writing to lower cache levels. It's not clear to me why an operating system would always go to disk though. This means any arithmetic operation is written to disk or perhaps written to cache, then to disk, skipping ram. I can't imagine the latter would work well though, due to the amount of data that typically moves through cache. SSDs are fast, but the majority of problems that people execute are bound by the cost of data movement rather than computational overhead. I can't imagine this would improve things in that regard.

This is making me want to dig around for technical documents if they're available. Apple might publish best practices for low level optimization somewhere, since some frameworks need them. Apple manages their own compiler toolchain, so I wouldn't expect their docs to be as detailed as Intel's (Intel has one too, but it lacks ubiquity), but they may be available.
 
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yurkennis said:
Anyone experienced that 16GB RAM is not enough on M1 Macbook?
What is your usage scenario when 16GB is a bottleneck?

Thinking whether going 16GB instead of 32GB is an option for me once M1X-based Macbooks are released.
Too hard to think in advance what can become a bottleneck for me.
Currently happy with 72GB iMac (Intel), but I was fine with 40GB on it, M1 is different from Intel, and Macbook will be secondary machine after all.
Click to expand...

ive tested both 8/16 models and for the time being 8 is enough but my usage currently is minimal, theres no room for expansion and i dont intend to upgrade soon either so i went with 16 to get longevity out of this laptop
 
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