I can't believe this thread went to four pages over this and the Op hasn't even installed his resource intensive software yet and checked to see what the memory pressure was like. It almost sounds like he is looking for a reason to return the machine because he feels buyers remorse and wants the old intel machine back because it was predictable? I don't think any explanation no matter how technical is going to completely satisfy his question.
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M3 Max MBP Excessive RAM Utilization
- Thread starter Mity
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The user was correct, it will grant way more ram than necessary as long as its available. Once you start to run out of ram, it will remanage itself. You can tell by opening something that’s far more demanding ram wise and you’ll see that YouTube’s ram usage will drop and the new app will increase. The memory pressure won’t be affected.
I went from 16GB to 36GB (M1 -> M3 MAX) and when i was on 16GB, it wasn’t as generous with ram.
Because that's largely what people do around here: Become overwhelmed by Apple's glitter throwing, buy a machine they don't actually need as a tool to get work done, fill their time instead chasing demons down imaginary rabbit holes.
As others have said: Without evidence of memory pressure showing apps are starved of memory, there is no problem. It is designed to manage itself. The end.
I think you are acting hysterical over something that has no effect on you and you should ne care about. Is the the machine sluggish? That would be something to complain about. Also, "for the first time yesterday" is ambiguous. Did you mean the first time using the M3 was yesterday or everything was okay the night before and in the morning's 1st use was when the issue was noticed.
It could be that I have an external SSD connected everytime I use my Macbook. Granted, yes my Macbook is an 8TB model, I still choose external SSDs.
Any modern OS is going to use as much DRAM as necessary and reallocate on the fly while the operating system, the APIs and the app determine what should be written to disk for later usage when an app is made active. Certain files, caching, logs and temp files make no sense to hold in DRAM as there is no penalty anymore for doing so if done right because SSDs are so fast now. You are going to have swap used even with 1.5 TB of DRAM, it’s just the way it is. Developers write to the lowest common denominator and make decisions on what they can afford to keep in RAM long term, what to write to disk for use later and what to purge from RAM or disk while running.
I have 12-16 GB of swap with 192GB of memory. No memory pressure. Not an issue.
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At the price it costs, be glad macOS is making you benefit from your RAM NOW and not just in 5 years.
Even for simple tasks, macOS will use as much memory as available on your system.
This sentence should be pinned somewhere on MacRumors because there's a new thread every day about that.
You are already worrying.
By 5 years, your machine will be old, and you'd not have used all that memory all that time. MacOS would use 8GB corectly, and 128GB also correctly. All modern OSs know how to use memory. In your case, if you don't like the way your Mac uses its memory, best return it, or go to Apple service personally and ask them.
It is not just Apps; Swap doesn't mean the Mac is struggling for RAM. Apple also offloads unused/ not recently memory to swap files proactively. The last thing you want to do when RAM is needed is offload unused memory to swap. It depends on how long the Mac has been running. I see swap files when the Mac hasn't been restarted for weeks. Once you restart, it goes away. Of course, the other aspect of the swap is to compensate for RAM, as needed.
I work a full-time job and take classes in the evenings. I can't reply to every person.
But it is true that I have not set up my environment yet due to time constraint. As I've already explained in another reply, I don't have any other frame of reference than my old Intel Mac. Compared to x86, memory IS being dynamically managed very aggressively? if that's the right word.
Memory management differences between Intel and Apple silicon are minor for the same macOS version.
Apple isn’t the one telling people to buy all this RAM, it’s people in these forums opening tabs and clutching their pearls when a swap file opens.
I’m not sure how this relates to what I wrote. I am curious as to which specific applications were in use to fill 192GB of RAM.
Meanwhile there are lots of people on this forum claiming 8GB RAM is plenty for most. 🤣
Given this argument, no task should ever be completed—given Parkinson's law "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". Yet tasks are completed, and computers do function.
Just like deadlines can be a useful tool to stop iterating at the desired quality level, so can boundaries for memory available prevent buyers from spending infinite money to cache everything. It is simply not necessary.
I need to know if OP understood how unified memory works on Macs. I need to know how this saga ends.
I'm not sure why there is any worry. If Memory Pressure is anything else but green, that's when to be concerned.
I'm using an M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB and according to Memory Used, I have 10.70 GB in use. App Memory is ~7.84 GB and Wired Memory is ~1.62 GB and Compressed is ~232.2 MB. The machine is running smoothly, even though it looks like it's going to swap everything with a few more applications running.
I'm using an M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB and according to Memory Used, I have 10.70 GB in use. App Memory is ~7.84 GB and Wired Memory is ~1.62 GB and Compressed is ~232.2 MB. The machine is running smoothly, even though it looks like it's going to swap everything with a few more applications running.
Maybe "Get as much RAM as possible. Swapping needs to be avoided at all, it will destroy the SSD in shortest time"?
The OS keeps all files ever read or written in the buffer cache as long as there is free RAM.
The access latency of an SSD is ~100us which is still 1000x slower than DRAM at ~100ns.
Why would it do that? Proactive work is often wasted work. I have never observed this on any Unix system as long as there is free RAM available.
Linux had it for a long time. On Linux, unless you disable or set the swapiness to 0 or lower value, it will proactively move out. In fact, you can control the Swap behavior in Linux to an extent with swapiness value. Ubuntu and Red Hat all behave similarly; by default, in Ubuntu, the Swapiness is set to 60 (0 being no swap till RAM is not enough, 100 being very aggressive to move out memory to swap). Waste is a strong word, it depends on usage, and also a trade off between performance/latency/ cost of IO among other factors. For DB, you may prefer swapiness between 0-10, but for systems with multiple processes, and jobs, apps a higher value will help.
You are right; the systems that I work on usually have a lot of RAM, and I can also remember sysadmins reducing "swapiness". On my Macs I usually have zero swap, even after weeks of uptime, both with 64GB and 16GB.
I know... it's OK if you do Safari, Mail, Music, Notes, Calendar and Contacts.
Once you go out of this ecosystem, clearly people need 16 GB and I'd agree this would be OK for 80% of the people. But Apple's being really cheap here.