Honestly, I understood all that stuff. What I didn't get is the particulars from vm_stat, because the man page would say something like "Pages free: the total number of free pages in the system." which doesn't really clarify "pages free."
Hmm do you know how much of that is RAM vs general CPU/GPU performance? And how complex is your modeling? I plan to get into learning 3D modeling for printing stuff, my 16GB M2 MBA has been vaguely ok enough once I turn settings down, figured things would be significantly better with the M4 Pro and 24GB...didn't think I'd need 48 and would like to save that $400 or whatever.
Yeah, I wasn't sure how far down the lack of clarity went. None of that stuff is very useful without something to compare it to, and even more it's all a function of uptime as well. Hence the BLUF – just watch memory pressure.
This is what I’m seeing. I ran the summary function on some emails yesterday.
Where did that rumor come from? Apple said it was, what, a 3-billion parameter parameter model and, by my reading, was quantized to ~3.5bits/parameter. That's not going to take up 7GB. They've said that the adapters used to specialize the model for specific tasks are in the 10s of megabytes each.
The model is trained with a kajillion hours of GPU time. It's not changed on your Mac. Because it doesn't change, it'll be a memory mapped read-only file. Because it's a memory mapped read-only file it won't be swapped out at all, the needed memory will just be zeroed and mapped into another processes space. When needed again it'll be paged back.
Yes, that is by design. Anything loaded in to RAM stays there until the memory is needed for something else. Which makes sense, because unused RAM is wasted RAM, and if you go back to what you were doing it's orders of magnitude faster if it's in RAM vs. storage. Pay no attention to Memory Used, Swap Used will tell you if you are using more memory than you have.
11:29:53 root@src:~# free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 8.0Gi 1.8Gi 1.5Gi 0.0Ki 4.6Gi 6.2Gi
Swap: 512Mi 0B 512Mi
What is that computer typically used for? The upgrade from a 2017 Intel model to an M4 is going to be huge on it's own.
A little of everything but the most processor/RAM intensive tasks will be photo (not video) storage and editing, and music production with Ableton Live. The rest will be light work: writing, web browsing and music/video streaming (although my User account typically has 30 Brave tabs open).
A very close friend does (personal) music production / editing with Ableton on a base model M1 Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM. More is certainly better, but I expect you're vastly overestimating the actual amount needed for the tasks you have listed
.I know. I'm just really disgusted by the idea of paying another $200 for just an additional 8Gb RAM.
asitop):htop shows real, immediate memory usage:htop shows ~12GB used with no swap and no compressed memory.
