What's the most effective way to reduce Memory Pressure?

Question

What's the most effective way to reduce Memory Pressure?

In Activity Monitor, you can show six different types of memory:

"Compressed Memory"
"Real Memory"
"Real Private Memory"
"Real Shared Memory"
"Purgeable Memory"
and just plain "Memory"

My question is, when Memory Pressure goes into the red zone and I need to start shutting down processes, which ones should I focus on?

The ones that are hogging Compressed Memory? The ones that are hogging Real Memory? The ones that are hogging just plain Memory? etc...

MacBook Pro 17″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Feb 25, 2021 10:17 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

David Criswell Author

Level 1

5 points

Feb 26, 2021 7:28 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks for your reply. Do you have a rationale for saying Real Memory first?

(I was hoping to learn a bit about these six different types of memory in the process of asking the question. It's really helpful that Apple provides a graph of Memory Pressure, but then they throw us to the wolves by not providing any advice as to the best way to get out of a high Memory Pressure situation.)

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

239,363 points

Feb 26, 2021 8:04 PM in response to David Criswell

Well, basically it being short is what causes all the others.. not quite exact, but when RAM is short they start jumping through hoops to get more, since operations can only be done between real RAM & the CPU, when RAM is near full it starts writing it toDisk, called VM, (Virtual Memory), but may have to page in & out several times doing the hot potato routine with rAM chunks.

The whole story is a lot more complicated, but never buy a Mac with less than 16 GB of RAM, not less than 32 GB of RAM if you want to do a couple/three things at once.:)

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