I currently have the following memory. It's a brand-new MBP 14 M2 computer. It is already using a swap file. I'm presuming it'll get worse over time. Maybe I was sold the wrong computer. What do you think? I have up to Saturday to go and get a new one.
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 13.3
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.
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How much memory do I need?
