MacBook Air, M2 Chip, 8GB RAM: Nothing is open, but half the memory is gone

50 点作者 lopkeny12ko10 个月前

21 条评论

I have this exact build of MacBook Air and in day to day use browsing the web, doing some light coding, and connecting to Kubernetes clusters hosted in the cloud, I don't really notice. There is definitely some disk swapping occurring but you don't really notice it in small amounts due to how fast the SSDs are.Would I recommend the 8GB of RAM to someone who wants to use it as their primary development machine or for heavy photo editing, absolutely not. Would I say it's OK for casual use, yes.Do I think Apple is being stingy considering their incremental cost for an extra 4GB or 8GB of RAM in the base model would be tiny, yes.

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lemonwaterlime10 个月前

Apparently, with the unified memory, Apple has taken the approach that unused RAM is useless RAM. Therefore, the system is greedy at allocating RAM and will release it to higher priority processes as they request it. Your system at baseline will always use "a lot" of RAM. This is to be expected.

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Someone10 个月前

It isn’t gone, it’s used. There may be a problem, but this data point IMO doesn’t provide any evidence for that.One way to do better is to launch a program that uses lots of RAM, and measure by how much that slows down other processes, whether it makes the Ui stutter, etc.

encoderer10 个月前

People are never going to understand RAM, but once more, for the cheap seats:It’s not gone! It’s there! You’re using it to type this and it will be there for you when you need it again.

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pimlottc10 个月前

My understanding is that processes generally don't give back memory until it's actually needed, so looking at memory usage in a low-usage state is often misleading. The real test is whether memory is quickly available when requested.

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geor9e10 个月前

This person is making a logical error. Their computer was running slow, so they freed up all the RAM they could. The computer immediately saw all that unused RAM, and filled it with temporary cache from the SSD, as computers do. It speeds up future reads and can be dropped immediately if needed for something else. Now he's taking that as evidence that the computer was wasting RAM the entire time, causing the slowness. To do it right he needs to open ram-hungry chrome tabs until the computer gives up all the RAM it can and screams for mercy, then subtract that amount from 8GB. That will give you the actual amount the system wont give up.

goosedragons10 个月前

This is essentially the same as my 8GB Surface Pro X. Lack of RAM is definitely felt. It's OK for basic web browsing and tasks like word processing but it's not hard to tank.

MissTake10 个月前

Computers use RAM and Water is wet.Sorry, not seeing the issue here - RAM is designed to be used. Why would it flush it if there’s no pressure?If one gets high swap then that’s a problem, but until then it’s simply the OS preemptively caching because “why not?”.If you’ve paid for 8GB then you’d expect the OS to use it. Not sure why anyone would want the OS to purge memory when it doesn’t need to. It costs nothing to keep it ready and the OS can either page it out or get rid of it as and when needed.This isn’t just Macs - happens on Windows as well.<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/11zp2ao/high_ram_usage_even_when_not_running_any_big/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/11zp2ao/high_ram...</a>

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robenkleene10 个月前

The comments on this thread illustrate an epidemic of ignorance of basic knowledge of macOS memory management (e.g., doing the laymen's mistake of looking at how much memory is used by applications, which is not a useful metric). At the very least you should read this article and note that this is from over a decade ago when memory management on macOS was comparatively simple <a href="https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-19-mac-os-x-process-memory-statistics.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-19-mac-os-x...</a>If you're not OS engineer with a specific specialization in memory management, I'd suggest just sticking to the Apple article on this subject, which explains the easy way of evaluating whether you're experiencing memory-related slow downs <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/check-if-your-mac-needs-more-ram-actmntr34865/" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/guide/activity-monitor/check-if-yo...</a>

mhx113810 个月前

Despite all the Ui tricks and metrics handwaving, even 16GB is not enough for a fluent dev-environment, with an IDE, a browser, slack, teams and docker. My 6 years old xps 13 with 16GB ram and Linux feels as slow as mbp m1 with 16 gb.8gb is a slap in the face.

superkuh10 个月前

Apple's irresponsible sales of unupgradable 8GB ram 256GB storage laptops have lead to plenty of work for consumer tech support. It's just kind of sad seeing the same thing over and over."I can't open $x because I'm out of memory." and "Time machine won't back-up anymore." (because their internal storage is full and isn't enough to generate the back-up to send to the octopus of external drives they have to use). And of course the inevitable breaking of the fragile externals and loss of data.

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talldayo10 个月前

Yep. Surprise! This is what happens when you replace 90% of your window views with WebKit processes rendering HTML. You'd think that Apple saw how poorly this ended for Windows, but no they just had to join in the fun too. No, zram is not a good enough excuse to suffer through 8gb of memory on a Mac.Thank you Project Marzipan/Catalyst. I love having hundreds of Safari processes running my OS instead of native Cocoa, yessiree.

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renewiltord10 个月前

Got my mum an M1 a while ago and my dad an M3. Lowest spec. It’s been great. They used their old one for six years each. These laptops rule. Amortized cost of $200/year including opp. cost of laptop. Great value for money.They can view x-rays and make presentations. Happy with that.

WhitneyLand10 个月前

Well RAM can be an interesting trade off.Have the last MacBook Pro Core i9 model with 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD and in trying to sell it the prices seem super low way less than 1k.I bet the M2 is worth way more.

sys_6473810 个月前

It’s already started compressing unused pages. In the old days we’d see those hit spinners.

more_corn10 个月前

Wow, it’s almost like the OS is taking up some ram and doing some OS related stuff. Which is perfectly normal and expected.8gb RAM is completely insufficient these days.Apple has been attempting to create a culture of scarcity for years, locking more ram away behind a thousand dollar upgrade when in reality it’s $20 worth of chips under a sane, user serviceable architecture.

znpy10 个月前

Two of them is file cache, which still leaves with the base os consuming 2.71 GB ram out of 8, but it's never exactly eight... it's always a little less.So basically an 8GB laptop is really a 6GB laptop. Yikes.Also, it's already using ~540mb of swap memory... Swap usage will kill the flash chip pretty fast.Besides everything, this will generate an incredible amount of e-waste.

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not_your_vase10 个月前

Haha, do you remember when Apple said that "8GB Mac RAM is equivalent to 16GB RAM on other operating system", and just when the world started to laugh at them, mysteriously Altman got fired from OpenAI, and everyone forgot about Apple?</half-ironic tinfoil hat off>

ProfessorZoom10 个月前

>gets the device targeted for people that do every task ever in a browser like students or corporate people >complains about ramlol

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nolist_policy10 个月前

And here my Chromebook with 8Gb ram has dozens of tabs and web apps open in Chrome, runs one VM with Android and another VM with Linux in turn running Firefox and more. All without breaking a sweat.

subjectsigma10 个月前

So, going to sound like an Apple apologist here, but a couple of times I tried to track memory usage on my Mac and it didn’t make sense. I looked up some articles about why processes seemed to be using massive amounts of RAM and others seemed to be reporting extremely small usages. The articles said basically that macOS RAM usage is hard to measure because Activity Monitor basically reports what the process thinks it has, not what is actually allocated. I can’t seem to find the article again so take this with a grain of salt I could just be yapping

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