How can I monitor my memory usage effectively?

Question

Is there anyone who can demonstrate how I would check whether my Mac or Windows computer requires additional memory?

Answer 1

If you want to see the memory consumption on a Mac computer, open the Activity Monitor application and check the memory pressure section. You should consider upgrading your memory if you frequently encounter yellow or red. With Windows, performance monitoring should suffice where paging data will get graphed. Constantly high levels of paging indicate excessive swapping by the computer which may warrant more memory being installed. Task Managers memory usage readings are not useful and should not be focused on. Quite naturally, a PC will use memory beforehand and will only perform further analysis after rugged programs’ and information have been removed from cache.

Comments

As someone who has been doing desktop support for close to 30 years I can say that as of 2023 whether PC or Mac it is best for everyone to go with 16g of RAM.  Even casual users have a habit of creating very complex situations for their machines and having that added memory really helps in not seeing sluggish behavior.  Especially because both the MacOS and Windows are eating up more system memory than ever with all the work they are constantly doing in the background.  A very basic scenario I see at work is a user with Outlook running, a web browser running, and Word running will be pushing the limits of what  8g of RAM can manage easily.  Now a virus scan kicks in, or an update starts to install in the background and suddenly that 8 g feels very sluggish.  Or you ask one of those three apps you have open to suddenly do something more demanding and again you're stressing the level of memory.  For a long time 4g was fine, then 8g, now it is 16g.

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A good trick to accelerate the ram swapping is by putting in a second ssd, and assign the swap file exclusively to that second drive.

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Nice content, I run linux, and after reading and testing a lot I came up with some tweaks to improve memory usage on linux. Zswap/Zram are pretty magical, Zswap is better though. I can use a lot of memory thanks to that. 12GB of ram + 18GB swap file (that is barely touched but lets me have a lot of compressed memory!)

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I was hoping for more detail on any differences (if any) for different os like Linux or windows vs macOS. But thank you for explaining to people that they should check swapping and memory pressure over allocation, I’m sooo tired of people looking at allocation and getting things wrong.

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For anyone who really wants to understand this, please read Mark Russinovich's "Mysteries of Windows Memory Management Revealed". Part II is most relevant for RAM, but Part I is also well worth reading for a deeper understand.

In short, there are two options:
1) Monitor Memory/Available Byes in Perfmon. You likely need more memory if it is consistently low.
2) Start RamMap and open the Priority Summary. You need more memory if priority 6 or 7 has been repurposed.