Comment by 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.
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.
I think there is something interesting there. I was running lighter workloads on similar RAM when I daily drove Debian and was frequently brought to my knees by swapping to death. I had to make conscious choices and manage my RAM usage to avoid it, and still occasionally got T-boned by something I overlooked. I have never had to worry about that with macOS.
I admit I don't have much experience with how Windows handles constrained memory since XP, and XP was abysmal at it just by virtue of being far more bloated than an equivalent Linux distro. It's certainly far more bloated nowadays, but maybe it handles memory pressure better.
None of this should be construed to say that macOS doesn't have serious issues or that it's not in dire need of a Snow Leopard-esque "0 new features" release. That's tangential to its memory handling, where I haven't seen the issues you describe.
Even NT4 handles memory pressure than modern day Linux. It's just not a fair comparison; Linux has never dealt with userspace OOM well.
As for macOS...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1njf1aj/bravo_apple_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nxh08n/impressive_m...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1jo5pnq/passwords_ap...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1gkwxe4/how_is_memor...
https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1seq0ij/freeform_has...
There are _plenty_ more. There is some fundamental library leaking given the range of impacted apps.
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