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. 🙂
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.
I've never used a Windows-based PC laptop that got more than a couple of hours of use on one battery charge. I get six to eight on my MacBook Pro, so apparently using the RAM doesn't affect battery performance.
So Mac OS Tahoe use 11GB ram with no apps opened?
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.
Why does macOS Tahoe use swap even with plenty of free RAM?
