deletedie on What Is Your RAM Usage on macOS? Share Your Workflow and Use Case

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macOS tends to view unused RAM as wasted RAM so it uses as much as possible which is different to the Windows approach. The integrated SSDs are also optimised for swap to aid with that. So the ideal outcome should be like you said, not having to care about usage

emptiestplace 1y

No, this is ridiculous - all modern operating systems use 'unused' RAM for disk cache.

jasomill 1y

As an example: with ripgrep searching the entire (500 GB) C: drive for a fixed string, Task Manager reports:

  CPU: 61% 2.49 GHz
  Memory: 10.3/48.0 (21%)
  Disk 0 (C:): SSD 100%

  In use (Compressed): 10.1 GB (0 MB)
  Available: 37.7 GB
  Hardware reserved: 1.0 MB
  Committed: 8.9/48.8 GB
  Cached: 37.9 GB
  Paged pool: 2.0 GB
  Non-paged pool: 979 MB

Observe that “Available” ≅ “Cached”.

The system is a VM with 48 GB RAM and an 800 MB pagefile running Windows 11 (and lots of background processes: Emacs, Tailscale, sshd, WSL, NVIDIA and Adobe shovelware, etc.).

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