I upgraded to macOS Tahoe on my MacBook Pro M3 Max (36 GB RAM). Even when the memory pressure graph is green and I have 10–15 GB of free RAM, Activity Monitor shows ~1–2 GB of swap in use.
On Sequoia, swap was almost never touched, even during heavy ML/AI workloads.
Has anyone else seen this behavior? Is this expected in Tahoe, or could it indicate a misconfiguration?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.0
Oh my bad! I truly appreciate your response 🙏
Yes, I tried all those solutions, including rebooting and even running in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, things looked fine, but in normal boot mode the memory ballooned like crazy.
As I mentioned earlier, I even took it to the Apple Store Genius Bar and they noticed the issue immediately (without me pointing out swap usage) and said they’ve seen a few similar cases. One time CgdPDFService alone shot up to ~60GB of RAM until I killed it. Apple confirmed my Mac hardware is healthy, so it’s definitely more of a Tahoe-specific bug than a machine issue.
For now, I downgraded to Sequoia, and it’s been stable even though it still uses a little swap, it’s nothing compared to Tahoe’s wild spikes. Hopefully Apple smooths this out in an upcoming release. 🙂
Oh my bad! I truly appreciate your response 🙏
Yes, I tried all those solutions, including rebooting and even running in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, things looked fine, but in normal boot mode the memory ballooned like crazy.
As I mentioned earlier, I even took it to the Apple Store Genius Bar and they noticed the issue immediately (without me pointing out swap usage) and said they’ve seen a few similar cases. One time CgdPDFService alone shot up to ~60GB of RAM until I killed it. Apple confirmed my Mac hardware is healthy, so it’s definitely more of a Tahoe-specific bug than a machine issue.
For now, I downgraded to Sequoia, and it’s been stable even though it still uses a little swap, it’s nothing compared to Tahoe’s wild spikes. Hopefully Apple smooths this out in an upcoming release. 🙂
_TaMee_ wrote:
Oh my bad! I truly appreciate your response 🙏
Yes, I tried all those solutions, including rebooting and even running in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, things looked fine, but in normal boot mode the memory ballooned like crazy.
That indicates that it's likely a problem with a 3rd party application or extension that you have installed. For example, you mention that CgdPDFService was using excessive memory, previous reports (Sonoma days) suggest that process misbehaves when a pdf is open in a 3rd party browser window and Spotlight is trying to index it.
I really appreciate your response... I took my Mac to the Apple Store Genius Bar, and without me mentioning anything about swap usage, they immediately noticed it. They told me they’ve been seeing a few similar cases lately and are hopeful Apple will fix these issues soon, if not in the next release.
Some of the problems were pretty wild—for example, CgdPDFService ballooned up to 60GB of RAM and kept climbing until I had to kill it.
For now, I’ve downgraded back to Sequoia until Apple releases a stable version of Tahoe. I’m much happier with this setup—even though it still uses a bit of swap memory, that’s fine with me. At least I’m not running into any nasty surprises. 🙂
It is possible there are processes running in the background that are using significant resources. Check Activity Monitor, Memory tab, sort by Memory.
Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support
No issues and no swap usage on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 48 GB memory.
_TaMee_ wrote:
Of course I do... And I am with you on this if I paid for it, why not use it... I do, I am into the field of Machine Learning so I use plenty of RAM at times, but immediately after restarting the system, I cannot run the program to train data and to use it... So, I am telling the case of that scenario when my RAM was still free and having more than 10GB free out of 36GB RAM, but still it uses Swap Memory...
My previous response was to cristifrommiami beach.
With respect to your issue of using swap, have you recently power cycled your computer? If not, try rebooting. Are you running any third party app that claims to manage memory or boost performance? If so, uninstall that app.
I'm pretty sure I had small amounts of swap used on previous OS versions. I only have 16GB of RAM, but still there was a couple hundred MB of swap used. When you quit an app, it will keep it in RAM or swap in case you open it soon thereafter. As you noted, the only time you need to care is if memory pressure gets into high yellow or red. It doesn't seem to be causing any problems for you. You should never assume anything Apple does is analogous to what somebody else did or does.
cristifrommiami beach wrote:
So Mac OS Tahoe use 11GB ram with no apps opened?
Unused RAM is wasted RAM— this is not the days of old.
Stored RAM makes your machine/user more efficient when launching running all your favorite apps, bringing up recent folders, files etc...
I see no issue. Let the OS manage your RAM.
If you have an issue you certainly did not present it here.
Is it currently swapping RAM?
Maybe what you are seeing is the amount accumulated over a long time period?
I may be wrong but I thought such figures in Activity Monitor showed the total amount since the last reboot which in some cases could be days or weeks.
No swap use currently on a 16GB M3 iMac. As noted probably something you have installed running in the background.
_TaMee_ wrote:
I upgraded to macOS Tahoe on my MacBook Pro M3 Max (36 GB RAM). Even when the memory pressure graph is green and I have 10–15 GB of free RAM, Activity Monitor shows ~1–2 GB of swap in use.
On Sequoia, swap was almost never touched, even during heavy ML/AI workloads.
Has anyone else seen this behavior? Is this expected in Tahoe, or could it indicate a misconfiguration?
I do not see this as an issue.
Are you having an issue—if so you do not say.
There is no user general setting or configuration for manipulating swap resources.
1-2GB of swap files does not seem huge by any means
I would let the macOS work on efficiency and file management whether it be RAM or otherwise,
I would spend my time fixating on something different.
cristifrommiami beach wrote:
So Mac OS Tahoe use 11GB ram with no apps opened?
Why would you not want it to use RAM? RAM use is dynamic and well managed by the OS. Use of RAM makes the computer faster and more responsive. You paid for RAM, why not use it?
How can it be possible that I don't open any app... But it's just that if I just open the basic apps and then check the Activity Monitor, it uses the Swap when still >10GB out of 36 GB RAM is free...
Of course I do... And I am with you on this if I paid for it, why not use it... I do, I am into the field of Machine Learning so I use plenty of RAM at times, but immediately after restarting the system, I cannot run the program to train data and to use it... So, I am telling the case of that scenario when my RAM was still free and having more than 10GB free out of 36GB RAM, but still it uses Swap Memory...
Yes, my Spotlight was indexing for a very long time.. But that happened immediately after the upgrade / reboot... I did check if any apps were open to use pdf - I couldn't find it in Safari browser or any other app... I didn't have time to investigate because the memory was inflating like crazy and so rapidly.. So, I immediately killed the process... I never used Sonoma (as I have been a Mac User for the last 1 year only) so, don't have all these experiences... :(
Thank you, appreciate your time and efforts to look into this and advising... :)
cristifrommiami beach wrote:
Because it consumes more battery when you have busy RAM, plus that, as a principle. If a system consumes a lot of RAM, it doesn't seem efficient to me.
Maybe you need to do a little research regarding RAM and its purpose. RAM is dynamic memory that stores often used or soon-needed data so that that data is efficiently available by the system as needed. The more data available in RAM (the fuller the RAM) the more efficient upcoming system operations will be.
Why does macOS Tahoe use swap even with plenty of free RAM?
