Should I be concerned about swap usage?

mrmagnetoman88 wrote:

I'm thus curious as to why, in spite of the fact that the RAM usage never gets close to 8GM, the computer uses swap?

I think that the operating system typically opens files using memory mapping. In some cases, this can case the open file to be represented as swap space.

Is this concerning and should I be concerned about the health of the SSD as a result of this?

It is not concerning and you should not be worried.

Does MacOS Sequoia use more RAM than MacOS Sonoma and older operating systems for the same activity?

Did you think that all those new features came for free? There isn't any significant difference. I haven't noticed anything. I actually skipped Sonoma altogether, so I haven't noticed any difference between Sequoia and Ventura. As Apple ramps up the use of AI, that's going to have a cost in terms of CPU, disk space, and RAM, but Apple also keeps giving us more of that to spend.

You're welcome. FWIW, your Mac will be obsolete before swap usage will have an effect.

The first action would to update to current Sequoia 15.2 - Current Version

Or, wait, a possible Sequoia 15.3 in just over the horizon

The swap file is a system file that creates temporary storage space on a solid-state drive or hard disk when the system runs low on memory. The file swaps a section of RAM storage from an idle program and frees up memory for other programs.

I think you may have answered your own question. I think it’s a good idea to shutdown each night and restart in the morning as this allows macOS to perform regular maintenance processes. If you want to do a deep maintenance periodically shut down and restart in safe mode followed by a normal restart.

if you have any antivirus or cleanup apps installed remove them using the developers instructions, they are a known cause of issues.

The more apps you have installed the greater chance of background tasks left running so remove old apps that you don’t use.

There's no real problem when the swap is measured in megabytes. It's when it swaps gigabytes you need to be curious.

The file swaps a section of RAM storage from an idle program and frees up memory for other programs.

Prolonged usage of Applications that are Idle and unused but still loaded ?

Only you can answer that question

FWIW. some RAM is used by the OS. An app or apps can't very well write over the RAM used by the system because the system would crash. I wouldn't fret over when swap is used.