How to best read RAM being used?

[Carl Lie]

Hey folks:

What is the best way to get a sense of the RAM being used by my mac. I'm looking at one of the new M2 models and am not sure whether I need more than 32 Gigs of RAM.

I loaded up a project that has several soft sample players and other synths and with activity monitor I see 14.5 GB in app memory and 6GB in cached files. Does the sum of those two approximate what I am using?

Thanks

C

[dominicperry]

Unfortunately you need to compare an M1/M2 machine with your workload to be sure. Using an Intel machine won't be as accurate.

In my opinion, the best way to do this is either:
1) max out the memory, regardless.
2) Look at Activity Monitor. Click on the memory tab and look at the Memory Pressure Graph and the amount of swap used.
If memory pressure is anything bigger than a little trickle at the bottom, you could do with more memory. If memory pressure is yellow, you could really do with more. If it's red, you need more memory.
If swap is a large number, (more than a few GB) you could usefully use more memory.
Check these things while you have everything running that you will reasonably expect to have running.

I have 64GB of memory. Memory Pressure is 4%. Swap is 0 bytes. Compressed is 0 bytes. That's how I like it. (I don't think "Cached" is particularly pertinent as it just gets flushed if the space is needed for something else).

Dominic

[JFreak]

16GB memory here (M1). Since last boot (13.1 update) swap used 794.3MB, compressed 1.18GB

[massivekerry]

Originally Posted by Carl Lie

Hey folks:

What is the best way to get a sense of the RAM being used by my mac. I'm looking at one of the new M2 models and am not sure whether I need more than 32 Gigs of RAM.

I loaded up a project that has several soft sample players and other synths and with activity monitor I see 14.5 GB in app memory and 6GB in cached files. Does the sum of those two approximate what I am using?

Thanks

C

There's an app available in the Mac App Store called Memory Diag. I used it for the last few years with my previous Intel machine. It was great to see what was being used, and also great for purging RAM if PT would crash or not release the VI-heavy memory block it had been using. Activity Monitor will also let you view Memory Usage by Process. Load a big session (for you) and see where you're at.

[Darryl Ramm]

What you are trying to do is maybe the wrong thought process. You can't upgrade memory on these Apple silicon based Macs so you should err on the side of over-configuring memory to meet future needs during the lifespan of the mac. And those future needs are hard to know.

As for what you are running now detailed calculations might not help answer future needs, you are running on old macOS, a new Mac is likely to run Ventura, with some more bloat. And Pro Tools consumption is very dependent on sessions/workload. Do you know what you will be doing in future? If updates of VIs will use more memory? And what will future Pro Tools and need? Memory use is probably going nowhere but up, nowadays even a stupid web browser can consume many GB of memory. And if you have to run under Rosetta that will add some memory use above what you would see on a native Intel machine. Some early ports of plugins to Apple silicon might be rough and need optimization etc.

If you have not been looking at memory use on multiple large sessions then maybe all you can say is you have not run into noticeable problems with 48 GB. So maybe 48GB is enough, maybe you want 64 GB on a new Mac to safe? Personally I could not think of buying a new Mac with less than 64GB, but that's me.

And what you are asking about in Activity Monitor is only part of the story, you need to also include wired memory, that's largely parts of the OS, and you need to include compressed memory. That's all then gives you an idea of how much memory is used by apps and the OS, but you also need some part of the cached files... a system without working cached files would perform like a dog. Yet it is that demand paging cache that works to fill up memory so well that it looks like all the memory is being used (it is but how well would stuff run in less memory is hard to answer). With modern demand paged operating systems if things are working OK you often don't know how things will run with less memory without just trying it... but then maybe you are heading in the wrong direction of being accurate about what you need now, on a quite different systems than what you will have in future, running different future workloads on different future software.

--

And similarly I would try if possible to buy internal SSD storage (for system/boot, sessions, and samples) to meet present and future needs. No Mac Apple Silicon Mac SSD are currently upgradable, most physically cannot be, and even if you are buying a Mac Studio which have Apple proprietary socketed NAND cards, there are no third party upgradable NAND storage cards you can install in a Mac Studio today so I'd be trying to configure the very fast internal SSDs to meet my needs. They are faster than any external SSD you can add, and they are likely to be more reliable and involve less futzing around than with external Thunderbolt or USB drives, cables etc.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by massivekerry

There's an app available in the Mac App Store called Memory Diag. I used it for the last few years with my previous Intel machine. It was great to see what was being used, and also great for purging RAM if PT would crash or not release the VI-heavy memory block it had been using. Activity Monitor will also let you view Memory Usage by Process. Load a big session (for you) and see where you're at.

These memory utilities maybe at best just repackage what you can find other ways, and at worse are scams. The operating system does not need help from a third party utility to say "purge" memory from an application that has crashed.

[massivekerry]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

These memory utilities maybe at best just repackage what you can find other ways, and at worse are scams. The operating system does not need help from a third party utility to say "purge" memory from an application that has crashed.

When I had 40 GB of Kontakt instruments loaded, on a 64GB machine, occasionally PT would crash, and trying to re-open would run out of memory. Occasionally. It became less of a problem as the years weren't on and versions of PT improved. But it was still a good way to quickly look at my menu bar and see what I was using. That's what convinced me to go to an Ultra with 128GB in my current system.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by massivekerry

When I had 40 GB of Kontakt instruments loaded, on a 64GB machine, occasionally PT would crash, and trying to re-open would run out of memory. Occasionally. It became less of a problem as the years weren't on and versions of PT improved. But it was still a good way to quickly look at my menu bar and see what I was using. That's what convinced me to go to an Ultra with 128GB in my current system.

I suspect you might have found something like a process from say a buggy VI memory cache/server is hung up and just needed to be killed. Of course a tool that helps just fix things can be very useful. But be careful with some of these tools. Some of them are really off in what they try to do, like you run them and suddenly the system shows more free memory... those can be total scams.

[Carl Lie]

Thanks for the replies. I was thinking of going cheap at 32GB but agree that 64GB should be the minimum if I want to future proof as much as possible. I do want 4 TB of drive space as well.

Be well.

C

[Rectifried]

back on my intel T can had 64 gig of ram, 12 cores

still had stupidity glitchy stuff with just 10 tracks running sometime... PT is a whack a Mole program.
have spent 1000s on spoon feeding it more ... only to find out its Just a cluster so matter what I "help it" with.
so good luck.
same computer same plugins, dif DAW, no problems.
avid is a ponzi scheme and this if from 20 plus years and pro use.
they are NOT a good DAW in computing world.
love the work flow. but ... really avid?

you hate your [loyal] customers that much?... yes,.. yes you do.