Comment by jdiff
1 day ago
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.
Seeing there are thousands running those apps (incl. Freeform) without memory leaks, it could be something else at play here.
It's quite clearly a bug and likely not one easy to diagnose or reproduce given the length of time the bug has remained in macOS. Or a fix would be a drastic breaking change.
Or Apple doesn't really care, though I doubt that's the case.
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