Is it true that current Mac OS wants to use all your RAM?

Forums › Mac OS › Is it true that current Mac OS wants to use all your RAM?

nongeek2025

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#315762 14-Aug-2024 12:53

According to this article - whether you’ve got an entry-level MacBook with the bare minimum RAM or a tricked-out Mac Studio with all the RAM you could afford, macOS will help itself to using it all.

1. Is this true?
2. WHY would any operating system need to access all your RAM. WHAT is it doing?

https://www.howtogeek.com/mac-ram-usage-high-dont-worry-about-it/?

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#3271384 14-Aug-2024 13:00

Where do you expect unused RAM to go?

nova

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#3271385 14-Aug-2024 13:02

You will also see similar behavior in Linux - see this article for an explanation: https://devopslearning.medium.com/understanding-cache-memory-in-linux-2760faf86f18

The simple answer is that it is better to make use of free RAM than have it sit idle, and if you use it for things like file cache you can almost instantly free up the RAM if it turns out that you need it for something else. File cache is just a copy of information that is stored elsewhere, and the purpose of it is to make things faster, but it can be discard in an instant without any loss of data. So by doing this you make things faster, with practically no downsides compared to the strategy of leaving the RAM unallocated

lxsw20

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#3271395 14-Aug-2024 13:08

Windows has done this too since at least Windows 7, as others have said whats the issue here?

jarledb

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#3271397 14-Aug-2024 13:14

OP, I am confused, you are asking the question and at the same time posting a link to an article that answers your question about RAM usage and concludes that:

"Don’t think of high RAM usage as a reason to buy a Mac with more RAM. Take it as a sign that macOS is doing exactly what it was designed to do: make the most of the available hardware."

Was there anything in that article that was unclear?

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timmmay

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#3271523 14-Aug-2024 15:24

Operating systems use RAM to cache files on the disk, as it's much faster than disk. If the memory isn't otherwise needed it's a good use of memory space. Every OS does this.

gzt

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#3271527 14-Aug-2024 15:38

Is it true that current Mac OS wants to use all your RAM?

The simplest answer here is - No.

robjg63

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#3271529 14-Aug-2024 15:44

I would be worried if any OS didnt want to 'use' all the memory I had installed.

That normally means there is something wrong with some of the RAM!

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wellygary

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#3271532 14-Aug-2024 16:11

timmmay:

Operating systems use RAM to cache files on the disk, as it's much faster than disk. If the memory isn't otherwise needed it's a good use of memory space. Every OS does this.

Although with a Modern PC its really DRAM vs NAND :),

But also the opposite is true, when you use up all the SOC DRAM and it needs more room to allocate, PCs will start paging out blocks of RAM to the SSD (SWAP) (and you will take a performance hot in whatever apps you are running)

timmmay

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#3271534 14-Aug-2024 16:15

Yeah, NAND is a lot faster than a spinning disk, but still about 10X slower than RAM.

nongeek2025

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#3271596 14-Aug-2024 17:29

jarledb:
OP, I am confused, you are asking the question and at the same time posting a link to an article that answers your question about RAM usage and concludes that:

"Don’t think of high RAM usage as a reason to buy a Mac with more RAM. Take it as a sign that macOS is doing exactly what it was designed to do: make the most of the available hardware."

Was there anything in that article that was unclear?

I’m not a geek, but I’m not a novice either. I’ve been using Apple computers for about 40 years.
I paid $1,000 Canadian for a 1 MB (no that is not a mistake) RAM upgrade when it was first possible to do that. I have always been conscious of RAM and what uses it, not just hard drive memory.

Being an early Apple adopter and a curious person - I quickly got into the system, something you can’t do on modern macs if you are a non-programmer geeks. The modern system does the equivalent of letting you toggle a few switches. Its not the same thing.

The article says: “Regardless of how much RAM you have on your Mac, it’s normal for macOS to use a majority of it most of the time. It might even seem like the system is using all of your RAM at a given moment, but this isn’t a reason to assume that your system is “running out” of memory.”

It didn’t use to be like that for a Mac system.

It is not logical to me that - assuming the same system and programs are in use, whether a Mac has a 16 or 64 GB of RAM it will have the system use mose of the RAM.
WHY? What’s it doing?

The article specifically warns there is a difference between high RAM usage vs high CPU usage. If you look at Activity Monitor high CPU usage tends to be due to specific programs which you may not be using at all - but are trawling your data.

In this era it behooves users to be aware that systems and apps / programs may be scraping data. I don’t agree with this. So this article sparked my interest.

gzt

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#3271598 14-Aug-2024 17:36

In this era it behooves users to be aware that systems and apps / programs may be scraping data. I don’t agree with this. So this article sparked my interest.

RAM is not really related.

gzt

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#3271599 14-Aug-2024 17:42

something you can’t do on modern macs if you are a non-programmer geeks.

Modern mac is based on unix bsd flavor. It has most of the unix tools available in the terminal like top. It is easy enough to install advanced tools like htop for detailed inspection.

RunningMan

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#3271602 14-Aug-2024 17:49

nongeek2025: The article says: “Regardless of how much RAM you have on your Mac, it’s normal for macOS to use a majority of it most of the time. It might even seem like the system is using all of your RAM at a given moment, but this isn’t a reason to assume that your system is “running out” of memory.”

It didn’t use to be like that for a Mac system.

Nope, it changed about 2001ish when OS X was introduced, the first of the BSD based OS's. With MacOS 9 and previous memory allocation was handled very differently.

nongeek2025

14 posts

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#3271626 14-Aug-2024 20:24

RunningMan:
nongeek2025: The article says: “Regardless of how much RAM you have on your Mac, it’s normal for macOS to use a majority of it most of the time. It might even seem like the system is using all of your RAM at a given moment, but this isn’t a reason to assume that your system is “running out” of memory.”

It didn’t use to be like that for a Mac system.

Nope, it changed about 2001ish when OS X was introduced, the first of the BSD based OS's. With MacOS 9 and previous memory allocation was handled very differently.

Thanks for that info.
It’s in the past 5-7 years I’ve noticed the most change.

Most users likely wouldn’t notice. But those of us who do graphics are much more likely to see when there is a drop in processing speed, even though we are more likely to have machines with enough grunt (high RAM and large HD capacity) to handle the demand of graphics programs, and enough sense to avoid background sync or Siri indexing or using unnecessary other programs when working on a project.

RunningMan

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#3271630 14-Aug-2024 20:29

Do you have an actual problem you are trying to solve?

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