Comment by crazygringo
16 hours ago
> Those mac minis make a great little server box but losing 8GB to hundreds of processes
It doesn't matter because all the extra stuff just goes to swap. And you can't disable virtual memory anyways. So in the end you're not really losing anything. Those hundreds of processes are ultimately basically mostly just using up a little bit of your SSD, not your RAM, so it's not a concern.
They’re not in swap if those processes wake up to do things
Yeah but they mostly barely do, and only the memory they actually access gets used, as opposed to everything they've allocated. You can observe the actual aggregate usage in Activity Monitor. This is why it's no problem at all to run something actively using 10-12 GB of memory on a 16 GB Mac.