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Comment by purple-dragon | Hacker News Reader

I have 16GB of RAM in my MBP. As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used. I'm not running any VMs, nor am I running any Adobe Products. Chrome, Spotify, Slack, Visual Studio Code, HipChat, Keynote, Sketch... this is a typical, yet light application load for me.

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OS X seizes all available memory for the apps you have open, and aggressively manages it as you open more and more apps. Free memory in Activity Monitor is not a useful measure of how many apps your machine can run with sufficient performance.

MacOS tends to use all the ram it has available but that doesn't mean it needs it all. Much of it is used for caching and the like. It's a good thing, since if you're going to be powering the RAM you might as well use it all, even for marginal benefit. That means though that if you had 64GB of RAM on your next MBP, you'd be (hopefully) running at 53.4GB used.

- Chrome

- Spotify (Chromium Embedded Framework)

- Slack (MacGap (WebKit))/(Electron (Chromium Embedded Framework))

- Visual Studio Code (Electron (Chromium Embedded Framework))

Notice a pattern? :)

Yes, the pattern is not lost on me :-)

>As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used

Yes, the OS will use as much memory as possible, this doesn't mean you are hitting memory limits or performance bottlenecks.

Except for when macOS tells me that it has run out of RAM and that I need to close some applications...

I think that only happens when your swap file takes up all available space on your drive

Perhaps, but that's not the case here. I have plenty of available disk space.

That used to happen to me weekly or so, but then I switched the majority of my browser workload from Chrome to Safari, and I haven't had that issue in the several months since.

I don't use a lot of tools that embed Chromium, though, so I'm not entirely sure just a browser switch would keep you from hitting memory pressure warnings.

I think you are very representative of the people complaining about the new MacBook Pros not having 32GB+ of RAM.

Out of curiosity, what's Activity Monitor report each is taking?

Forgive my laziness, but it's a pain for me to answer due to all of the Google Chrome Helper processes that I'd have to sum to supply you with an accurate answer :-)

Understood :) Similarly, I'm amazed at how much CPU some Safari tabs can use. (How do these tabs keep proliferating?)

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