I understand roughly. So the conceptual point is that most computers are sort of ‘filling’ the RAM to near capacity if I might put it that way?
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An OS does not take up a fixed or ‘near capacity’ amount of RAM as different parts of the OS will be loaded at different times, according to need for the OS itself as well as app usage, and storage will be periodically offloaded to storage based on need, priorities and how much RAM is installed. macOS will also dynamically compress inactive memory, and decompress if the app returns for foreground.
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So it doesn’t ‘fill up’ in a sense? It is not essential for me to understand this now really but I don’t feel I am understanding it very well and though I think people explaining it do understand it I am finding they say different things under my interpretations: it is a general problem of communication I have found.
Your explanation seems to me the most plausible to be honest it was how really I more or less assumed it worked. Is it fair to assume that with a limited RAM, 8 or 16GB that modern OS will pretty much be using most of it most of the time though, giving the impression it is always ‘full’?
Given system requirements 8-16Gb RAM will definitely be used (and used up) - and stressed hard when using multiple apps, tabs and/or menubar utilities, often resulting in slowness (because Virtual Memory will often be invoked, necessitating writing to disk). It’s an interesting topic, google it when you have some free time.
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I did on your suggestion. It WAS interesting and I really helped me understand how computers really work at hardware level and how they connect to things I do know about. Your explanations was as succinct and helpful as anything as brief as I saw. Thanks. I had really misunderstood the whole thing conceptually.
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FYI right now my iMac with 40Gb RAM has 10 apps open, plus 32 tabs open in my web browser (a third of them YouTube videos), plus around three dozen menubar utilities running. Here’s what Activity Monitor shows as a summary and for the top apps’ memory usage (out of a very long list) - the memory is pretty much tapped out and ‘swap’ is saved to disk:
CleanMyMac X says:
It can wipe RAM caches, which in this case probably mostly means knocking out YouTube video data from all those open tabs, which is fine with me. (It’s easy to click to continue a given video and I can pick up where I’d left off.) So I click ‘Free Up’ and about 15 seconds later:
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Out of curiosity, how often do you reboot?
Every 2-3 weeks. According to Terminal my last restart was May 8th, after an uptime of 14 days.
I sometimes also see swap use after long uptimes and similarly not-really-heavy use. It makes me wonder if macOS will favour paging out very inactive RAM over purging more recently cached data under some circumstances.
interesting to see other people’s usage, I have way more RAM than I will ever need then. I am ok with that for the extra cost it was well worth it.
When I’m in Ableton Live or Lightroom/Photoshop I try to close out most of my other apps to have maximum usable RAM, because dealing with swap files in audio can lead to stutter and cause discernible slowdowns when working with large images.
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Your usage is very much higher than mine. I have to say that 64GB of RAM is overkill for my use. Sometimes up to 15 tabs open, maybe one or two video ones if that; otherwise Ulysses, DEVONthink 3 maybe Pages or Mellel and Messages and Mail open at the same time; sometimes some simple cropping of photos that I use to send info. I don’t even use Siri, just don’t find I do, I have it turned on. I do dictate sometimes messages on iPhone: that is only because I find thumb typing way to slow. I type at composition speed if you know what I mean.
I am still in the habit of closing apps much of the time. I think I could stop doing that as much?
I will say that my new computer runs very smooth; how much of that is down to RAM I can’t really claim to know. I had 16GB before and felt it was struggling sometimes I have to say, for whatever reason. I don’t regret getting this much though. Maybe at some point somebody in my vicinity can get the full use out of it for video or something. Myself even! I appreciate the time and trouble you got to on this forum.