Yes, do not be overly concerned about RAM usage if it there is no degradation in performance. Perhaps the attempted summary on memory usage I posted in an earlier thread (and the discussion) is helpful.
Not long ago I was learning about macOS memory management and had written this elsewhere. I hope this is useful and do let me know if I get any of the details wrong!
The high RAM usage is an inherent feature of macOS’s memory management system. macOS (whose kernel is derived from Mach kernel ) features “a fully integrated virtual memory system ” that is always on. The virtual memory system comprises the physical RAM itself (the expensive ones) and drive storage (also expensive but much cheaper).…
Also consider that file I/O also goes through the virtual memory system in normal circumstances. Memory serves as a disk cache - and will be released first if the system needs memory. (Data written typically gets flushed to disk but is kept in this in-memory cache).
This is why simply using “free memory” numbers is misleading. If free memory is low it does not mean that your system is out of memory.
As is stated, the degree of paging activity is a better indication of whether you have over su…
This new Memory Management system came first in macOS Mavericks and resulted in my no longer monitoring the memory usage statistics altogether. It’s designed to speed up your computing experience by keeping RAM as full as possible with system and application cache files so they don’t have to be continually retrieved from your drives.
Apple guidance at the time was and still is to instead look at the graph in Activity Monitor’s Memory tab in the lower left corner called MEMORY PRESSURE. As long …
One other important detail for M1 Macs is that the use of Unified Memory, where the CPU and GPU share the installed RAM. So with 32 GB, all the usual application memory comes out of the 32GB installed, but also all the graphics memory is taken from the same 32GB. It makes tracking memory usage a lot trickier. This is a good article explaining how all that works on an M1 Mac.
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