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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

They compress memory a lot. It almost works on the Mx. Almost.

TBH not even 16 Gb is enough if you open more than a couple terminals and less browser windows that you can count on your fingers. Cook help you if you use IntelliJ.

Bonus, every piece of Javascript uses 1+ Gb. Look for <app name helper - renderer>. Those are the main culprits.

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I have 16GB. I have docker running 5 containers, 3 PHPStorm windows (with multiple tabs open), Orion with 17 tabs open, Slack, Fork, Sequel Ace, iTerm2 with multiple tabs (one of them running a vite server), and Calendar.app.

Memory pressure is in the green, "using" 11GB (App: 6, Wired: 2, Compressed: 3). Not swapping at all.

Slack, which as you mentioned has "Slack Helper (Renderer)" uses 250MB.

Even with 8GB this would still work perfectly fine. Biggest user is PHPStorm with 4GB.

Eh? I have a 16gig iMac and am very lazy about closing apps I’ve never had any memory problems and don’t even think about it other then running something like Adobe Premier Pro for video editing.

Yeah, see my sibling comment. I don't know what the person you're replying to has done to their system, but I am very lazy with that too. Not at the moment, but most of the time I have 3 user accounts logged in simultaneously with their respective apps running.

Memory has never really been an issue for me, unless I try to `grep` a very (VERY) big file or something. Which makes sense, right?

I suppose you have less Electron apps open :) I'm using 12 Gb now (1.53 in swap) with Firefox and several communication apps open. Fortunately atm all my works is in Terminal.

MacOS treats unused memory as wasted memory. It does its best to keep memory filled. So a lot of that 12Gb is likely to be 'just in case' stuff. What does the memory pressure graph look like in Activity Monitor?

The thing is, when I run an applicaion that allocates 8 G on top of that, it compresses like 7 G, memory pressure turns brown, it goes 3-4 G into swap and sometimes the app crashes :)

So the legend has a grain of truth, but you can only stretch it so much.

Thing is, when I have 3 or 4 Electron apps open, they are still not using 100% "real" memory - it's all compressed if the need arises. What other apps that you use, use Electron?

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