Comment by sgt

1 day ago

macOS is generally pretty amazing at efficient memory usage and VM (virtual memory subsystem) handling. So even a 8GB machine can run pretty impressive workloads without having the user think the machine is underpowered.

15 comments

sgt

stingraycharles 1 day ago

Important caveat: that’s mostly the case for desktop workloads when you’re multitasking a lot, and not as much for server workloads where you actually need all memory.

p_ing 1 day ago

Not really. Larger page sizes mean more potential for wasted memory and it has had a long standing memory leak in some core component to where even Calculator can cause an OOM event.

jdiff 1 day ago
GP is pretty accurate in my experience. Up until last year I was still running an Intel MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM and successfully multitasked with Blender, Illustrator, Unity, VS Code, and Firefox quite often. The math doesn't make sense, but all stayed responsive even with frequent hops between them. The only OOM events I ran into were memory leaks from Firefox, I believe from an extension.
- p_ing 1 day ago
  
  There's nothing particularly interesting about that. Linux distro-of-your-choice can run the equivalents fine, as can Windows.
  Browse /r/macos if you dare to wade into the uninformed cesspool; it's full of OOTB apps causing OOMs (among 3rd party apps) with the past at least two major versions of macOS.
  
  6 replies →
sgt 1 day ago
I mean if there are faulty apps, but where do you get this idea from? The amount of IDE's, docker containers, all kinds of stuff you can run on macOS in just 16GB is astounding. And I've used this OS on the desktop for 23 years.
- p_ing 21 hours ago
  
  It's not really that interesting in the landscapes of OSes; modern (or even ancient) Windows and Linux distros have been doing these tasks simultaneously in one form or fashion since 16GiB was seen as a lot of RAM.
  See my other post for just a tiny amount of references to OOTB faulty apps.
  
  3 replies →