How much memory do I need?

1) If you are running anti-virus or so-called "cleaning" apps, those will affect RAM usage. Remove any such software and let your Mac be a Mac.

2) If you are using Chrome, it is a known resource hog. It and its minion "helpers" can use massive amounts of CPU cycles and RAM.

3) A simple restart is the 100% effective way to clear RAM on a Mac.

There is a way for us to quickly see if something is contributing to high RAM usage and swaps without playing a protracted game of "20 Questions"with you that could go on for days.

We can quickly and within the confines of these forums help you determine what issues are at play if you use EtreCheck Pro, available here:

https://etrecheck.com/index

The free version will do nicely for this purpose, although the app is worthy of our financial support.

We can see hard data about drive performance, software issues, and RAM usage. Etrecheck is the development of a long-serving and trusted contributor here expressly for displaying information in these forums to help us help you in this setting where we can neither see nor touch your tech gear. It will not reveal any personal or secure information.

We senior contributors here have reviews thousands of these reports over the years and may see something important in the report that will not "jump out" at a new EtreCheck user. Posting the report often leads to an issue being fully resolved with only one more post of your part.

The report is too long to post directly, but this this excellent user tip shows how to post long text reports like EtreCheck using a feature included in the forum software.

How to use the Add Text Feature When Post… - Apple Community

That depends completely on what you have been running, and how long you have gone since restart.

But cutting through the details, straight to the conclusion:

if that is your typical use, you could clearly benefit from MORE.

Isn't there a more modest cost 24 GB option on that model?

I see now. 24 GB offered, but only on the 13-in model with Touch Bar, or the fanless MacBook Air.

What were you doing in that day? could you have closed something and gotten by without overflowing RAM? such as closing Browser while editing Video?

In some cases, spilling to swap is no big deal, if you can clear it up later with a restart.

It is a mildly complex subject, and you will find differing views.

What you appear to be doing now is akin to "Doctor shopping" to get the view that you want to hear.

You have dodged my early questions: "what work do you do on this computer?"

and you have dodged my follow up: "are there steps you could take while doing your most intensive work that would keep memory use to a lower level?"

From that description, you don't appear to need to spend US$400 to upgrade to 32 GB.

Quitting un-needed Apps while editing is often the Quick-fix that allows most users to get by with less.

If your Mac gets slow, such as when swap used grows large, a Restart sets it all back to the baseline.

Swap is used more aggressively when launching NEW Applications in low-memory situations, because other ways to get more RAM available would take longer, and you should be able to open More Apps when you want to, and not have your computer seem slow.

Since macOS 10.9 Mavericks, Mac memory management is optimized to USE available RAM, such as to cache some previously-read files in RAM, and discard only the oldest least-recently-used previously-read data. "Unused RAM is wasted RAM"

Another optimization added at 10.9 Mavericks was compressing data in RAM, which is far, far faster than spilling it out to the Swap area.

y34r-z3r0 wrote:

It's a good habit to close unused apps and only launch them when needed. [...]

[...]

a subtle distinction, but:

it can be better to QUIT unused Apps rather than just Close all their windows, because closing all their windows does not necessarily get them to Quit and release all their RAM memory.

Please post the complete report. It is pre-laundered of all personally-identifiable information.

The approved procedure is the "share" the report to the Clipboard, then use the "additional text" icon in the reply footer to post the large clipboard.

That is the cleanest report I have ever seen posted here. No Bad actors, not even any marginal actors.

Based on how you are working today, this part of the report sums up how you will be working in future:

Top Processes Snapshot by Memory:

Process (count) RAM usage (Source - Location)

com.apple.WebKit.WebContent (12) 1.94 GB (Apple)

Creative Cloud UI Helper (Renderer) 1.13 GB (Adobe Inc.)

EtreCheckPro 1002 MB (Etresoft, Inc.)

Adobe Desktop Service 328 MB (Adobe Inc.)

Safari 239 MB (Apple)

With this Mac with 16 GB installed, If you need a LOT more RAM to edit stuff in Adobe Apps, you can quit Safari (or restart and just not launch safari) and get back a couple of GB to work with. (That is the Safari memory AND the WebKit memory.)

If you choose 'trouble-free', do what you want when you want, that's pay up and exchange for 32 GB model.

Sometimes I see this on my laptop when it runs for more than a few days without shutting down. And I can't say that I need more than 16 GB of memory.

It's a good habit to close unused apps and only launch them when needed. I would also review the list of software in startup.

Obsessive compulsive disorder is the best remedy for any computer 😅