Memory over usage in MacOS 27.2

...and found nothing alarming there.

There is a reason for that finding

With massive changes Apple made to macOS memory management in Late 2013, Memory Used became a dead-issue metric. The new metrics that evaluate memory performance are Memory Pressure and SWAP used. The later is a gauge of how much virtual memory is being used.

If Pressure is in the green and SWAP is under about 500MB, all is well. Very well.

A simple restart resets memory metrics. My M4 Pro MacBook Pro has 24 GB RAM yet I still restart it once a week. Old habits, ya know.

Here's some data. After the new system was in place, I did an extended test using an 2010 iMac i7 with 12 GB physical RAM running Sierra. This screenie is from its Activity Monitor footer after using the computer a few hours:

Note that over 11 GB of the 12 GB of physical RAM shows as "used," but Pressure is at its lowest displayable value and SWAP is zero. At the time of the test, the computer was running fine without issue or complaint.

Are you having performance issues of symptoms that made you test your memory? Based on dreadfully long participation here, I find that slow storage, overcrowded storage, and useless aftermarket utilities (anti-virus; "cleaners"; VPNs) cause hundreds of performance complaints for every complaint that turns out to be due to insufficient memory/RAM.

Are you seeing something like this?

Example from a very lightly loaded machine running Sequoia.

Modern versions of macOS operate on the assumption that completely idle RAM is RAM that isn't doing anything for you. So macOS will often put "idle" RAM to work holding Cached Files. If the Mac needs the cached data before it needs the RAM, this saves a trip to disk to get it. If it needs the RAM first, it just dumps some of the cached data.

The more "idle" RAM you have, the more is available for this optimization – and the more the Mac will use.

So the things you really want to keep your eye on are the Memory Pressure graph (color coded green/yellow/red) and the Swap Used.

Your memory use is fine.

Have you installed any third party cleaner, vpn, protection or other apps that may be affecting performance?

WallyMi wrote: Since MacOS 27.2 I've been having this weird issue where Teams, Mail, and three Safari tabs throughout the day just creeps up to over 30GB memory utilization by the end of the day.

Each? Or in total?

The problem here is that you're talking about app memory, and that's very specific. Yet you're talking about it in very general terms. If you have specific questions about memory usage, you can post a screenshot from Activity Monitor showing the questionable usage. That top-level VM usage isn't helpful.

Memory pressure isn't helpful either. That's one of those terms (like "available storage") that Apple invented, without any meaning to back it up. Try to find out what memory pressure means, or how it's calculated. I dare you.

It's better to focus on specific, identifiable problems that you're experiencing. In your first post, you didn't indicate any actual problem.

Here's what I see, this isn't worrying and totally fine. Just weird that there are things built in that don't work while the memory reads this high. Siri doesn't work at all, Universal Clipboard doesn't work, and AirDrop stops working. Randomly it's going to drop back to 12GB used and then it all works again.

This is a little better, but I'm still confused whenever someone says "totally fine" and "things don't work". So which is it?

Siri is currently a royal [*******] [****], so let's either set that aside, or deal with it separately.

Universal Clipboard is a very specific feature, as described here. I want to make sure that's what you're talking about first, because there are a number of new Clipboard features. It's based on Bluetooth, so anything with radio waves is going to be flaky. And it's pretty flaky to begin with. But at least in this case you can describe exactly what you're doing (down to the keystroke please) and talk about what you expect to see, vs. what actually happens. Other people can try to reproduce that.

AirDrop is another good one for debugging.

So most likely, the problem has nothing whatsoever to do with memory usage. Hard to say what the actual cause is. Modern macOS is easily the most complicated operating system ever made, and it's not close at all. There are many potential problems that could be happening throughout the day that might cause this.

To give just one example (out of legion) - the other day, I was computing happy as a clam at 10:27am. But unbeknownst to me, the operating system decided to go insane. A low-level process started taking 100% of the CPU and eating up all of my free storage. But I'm not like most people. I have more than the bare minimum free storage required to update the OS (which I don't do). I have 466 GB free on this computer. Or at least I did at 10:27am. By 2pm, that was gone. Strangely, a restart fixed the storage problem, but the "dasd" process continued running out of control. I tried to examine what it was doing and wrote a little script to simultaneously kill the process and brutally erase all of its data. And that fixed it. This is Apple devices work now.

WallyMi wrote:

Other *nix systems have PSI for calculating it so it's not a made-up thing.

I have an Ubuntu machine but I rarely use it. On the Mac, memory pressure is just eye candy.

Universal Clipboard is copying across devices in the ecosystem and it was broken while memory was high.

"high" is too general of a statement. macOS tries to use all available memory. There really is no concept of "high memory". If individual apps are using too much memory, then that's a problem. Or if there's swap usage, that's a problem.

And "memory" is a tech fluid concept on a Mac. In Activity Monitor, there are six different kinds of memory that it reports per process.

And finally, Universal Clipboard is not straightforward. Apple's description of Universal Clipboard 1) doesn't go into the nuances of the actual user experience, and 2) is wrong. So for all I know, you're basing "broken" on that and Universal Clipboard is actually working as expected. You would need to provide a very detailed set of reproduction instructions.

Same with Airdrop and other stuff, but I think I figured it out.

Follow-up is always welcome...

If you keep the same Siri chat open it bugs out, making a new chat and leaving it blank. Fixing it all, and Siri isn't bad at all. It's been very helpful with things like getting a quick shell command I forgot or command for deploying tf.

But you're talking about two different things. The content you're seeing is just Google Gemini. That's standard AI chatbot stuff. It's really just doing Google searches and summarizing the results, while telling you how attractive and smart you are.

If there's a problem with the user experience of the actual Siri window, then that could be on the Apple <-> Google connection, or it could be typically bad Apple software. Like most other developers, Apple is embracing AI and it's not good. A professional software developer should have the capability to write their own code. But even if they use code provided by a colleague, live or artificial, they still have a responsibility to test it. That isn't happening anymore. Maybe it's all the sycophantic praise. The chatbot is telling the developer how brilliant they are for using the chatbot, so developer doesn't think it could possibly be wrong.

Why do you think memory is being overused? RAM is dynamic memory managed by the OS.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. If you paid for 48GB RAM why wouldn't you want to use all of it?

I also noticed more RAM being used with OS27 vs OS26 but all is still running OK. But I'm still staying under 20GB with my use.

My AM chart (M4 Pro MacBook Pro 14; OS 27.2) with 12 Safari tabs, Mail, and Activity Monitor running.

Running great! Look a lot like yours.