Memory Usage differences between 4 GB MBP and 16 GB MBP

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Penage
Penage
Community Member
in Mac

Just upgraded my MacBook Pro and moved from 4 GB of memory to 16 GB. On my old 4 GB MBP, 1Password would take around 80 MB of memory. But now, with more memory to play with, 1Password is taking about 320 MB of RAM. Really just wondering what's going on. It's the same story with iTunes and other apps as well.

Why would the RAM footprint be so much bigger, other than 'because it can'. Thanks for whatever insight you can provide.

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  • MikeT
    MikeT
    edited October 2014
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    Hi @Penage,

    That's the nature of OS X's aggressive RAM optimization, OS X will use all of your RAM to speed up the apps you're using, improve the scrolling performance by caching views in advance, and so on.

    Unused RAM is just wasted RAM, having 10GB being unused is the same as having 10GB being used in terms of power consumption, so why not take advantage of it.

    OS X will compress the data in memory to free up whenever you need more memory for your apps.

    Starting with Mavericks, what you should look for is how much disk swapping is occurring, not the memory consumption. The less the better.

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