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Not really. Larger page sizes mean more potential for wasted memory and it has had a long standing memory leak in some core component to where even Calculator can cause an OOM event.

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GP is pretty accurate in my experience. Up until last year I was still running an Intel MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and successfully multitasked with Blender, Illustrator, Unity, VS Code, and Firefox quite often. The math doesn't make sense, but all stayed responsive even with frequent hops between them. The only OOM events I ran into were memory leaks from Firefox, I believe from an extension.

There's nothing particularly interesting about that. Linux distro-of-your-choice can run the equivalents fine, as can Windows.

Browse /r/macos if you dare to wade into the uninformed cesspool; it's full of OOTB apps causing OOMs (among 3rd party apps) with the past at least two major versions of macOS.

I think there is something interesting there. I was running lighter workloads on similar RAM when I daily drove Debian and was frequently brought to my knees by swapping to death. I had to make conscious choices and manage my RAM usage to avoid it, and still occasionally got T-boned by something I overlooked. I have never had to worry about that with macOS.

I admit I don't have much experience with how Windows handles constrained memory since XP, and XP was abysmal at it just by virtue of being far more bloated than an equivalent Linux distro. It's certainly far more bloated nowadays, but maybe it handles memory pressure better.

None of this should be construed to say that macOS doesn't have serious issues or that it's not in dire need of a Snow Leopard-esque "0 new features" release. That's tangential to its memory handling, where I haven't seen the issues you describe.

Even NT4 handles memory pressure than modern day Linux. It's just not a fair comparison; Linux has never dealt with userspace OOM well.

As for macOS...

https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1njf1aj/bravo_apple_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nxh08n/impressive_m...

https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1jo5pnq/passwords_ap...

https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1gkwxe4/how_is_memor...

https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1seq0ij/freeform_has...

There are _plenty_ more. There is some fundamental library leaking given the range of impacted apps.

Seeing there are thousands running those apps (incl. Freeform) without memory leaks, it could be something else at play here.

It's quite clearly a bug and likely not one easy to diagnose or reproduce given the length of time the bug has remained in macOS. Or a fix would be a drastic breaking change.

Or Apple doesn't really care, though I doubt that's the case.

It seems rather easy to diagnose actually any of those users could use the heap profiling tools that ship with the OS

I mean if there are faulty apps, but where do you get this idea from? The amount of IDE's, docker containers, all kinds of stuff you can run on macOS in just 16GB is astounding. And I've used this OS on the desktop for 23 years.

It's not really that interesting in the landscapes of OSes; modern (or even ancient) Windows and Linux distros have been doing these tasks simultaneously in one form or fashion since 16GiB was seen as a lot of RAM.

See my other post for just a tiny amount of references to OOTB faulty apps.

My experience along with thousands others (incl 100 other Macs at work) is that of stability. You're saying the opposite based on some Reddit threads. Not sure what your intentions are. Yes, modern OS's might have issues in runtime, but of the top 3, I am pretty sure macOS is the most stable. Linux wins on the server side though.

I'm happy for your personal experience; it clearly doesn't jive with the numerous threads on the macos reddit forum for first and third party apps causing OOM issues (which macOS ungracefully handles, unlike NT).

> Not sure what your intentions are.

This is just a weird statement.

> Yes, modern OS's might have issues in runtime

/All/ modern general purpose OSes have issues at runtime. Every last one of them. macOS isn't without it's significant UX and other faults. It's OK to acknowledge them; this isn't a religion.

Looking at your comment history - it does seem you have an agenda. I don't get it. Yet your references are mostly anecdotes from random forums that back your claim. You'll find that for any OS or any piece of software if you go looking.

> Looking at your comment history - it does seem you have an agenda.

This is just weird behavior for HN. I suggest you re-evaluate how you participate in conversations, here.

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