Yellow memory pressure that spikes into red with MacBook Air M1

apple_user73 wrote:

I've seen the swap get elevated at over 5gb of swap often enough. Is it bad for my Mac to be using it while memory pressure is almost always in yellow and spikes into red or it won't affect it over time?

If you are constantly swapping things out to SSD, that could shorten the life of the SSD. I'm not sure by how much (you'd need to know the rate at which you were writing to the SSD, and the SSD's expected lifetime write capacity). But that SSD is soldered in, so any repair would be expensive and quite possibly uneconomical.

I've found some apps closing (not sure if it's random or coincidences) and find some lags while operating some tasks (the little loading round colourful wheel).

Those Reds indicate periods when you did not have enough RAM for what you were running, and where that was hurting performance. The Yellows indicate periods where RAM was marginal.

That graph shows that the amount of RAM you had was insufficient or marginal all of the time, and that there was lots of swapping on. I'm not surprised that you saw "lags while operating some tasks" in the form of the spinning wheel.

apple_user73 wrote:

....

Recently having my safari open with around 11 tabs and messages open (with all other applications forced quit), my memory pressure is always in the yellow and sometimes spikes in red......

These days it is not unusual for websites to download as much as a GB of data to the computer (this page alone which is quite simple is 250MB). This also does not include any RAM caching of website data. So with 11 tabs open depending on the sites, it is no surprise that the RAM is being used up. Since you have already looked at memory pressure, just look at the list and you will see how much RAM each website in those tabs are using up.

With the advent of more powerful user devices, websites are putting much more processing onus on the user rather server side processing as in years past when the internet was just starting out.

Other than the obvious performance degradation, no harm results from using swap space.

8 GB memory isn't much these days.