That is interesting, I run Firefox, VSCode, containers and whatever code I'm working on. I never even need to look at RAM usage. It would be interesting to know what triggers the RAM limit in your case.

The only application I ever need to terminate is Notes, which for some reason is extremely crash prone on the mac.

I find that spouses never close apps, only close windows, or worse hide them and forget. If one of them is Photoshop...

What? I’ve caught Safari using 22GB of memory another day.

Open 1000tabs and it will kill any machine.

Since a person cannot look at 1000 tabs at the same time, most of the tabs can be frozen. I'm writing to you from Firefox which has 826 tabs right now.

Congrats, you are in the top 7% of users who uses this horrible browser.

Firefox is just really good for handling huge amounts of tabs because you can install alternative tab UIs like Tree Style Tabs and scroll/search tabs like they are bookmarks.

Clearly you are not a web developer. Safari is by far the worst browser today. The new Internet Explorer.

Until Netflix supports full res in Chrome, and until Chrome battery consumption is on par with Safari, I’ll keep using Safari.

Any browser can use massive amounts of RAM if you open a lot of tabs. Especially if they are running a lot of JS that doesn't release its memory properly. There are some sites I can go to that just continue to chew away at the RAM as long as the tab is open.

In any case, it's pretty easy for the OS to swap out browser data as it is chunkable by tab. Just because it had allocated 22GB doesn't mean that it was all active. Must was certainly swapped to SSD.

That sounds like she is running out of disk space, not RAM.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted -- macOS uses available disk space as swap, and if your disk is full (and thus has no more room for swap) then it will pop up this dialog.

If you're swapping you need more RAM.

> "choose which application to terminate"

What is that?

I've been using macs for decades, and I've never seen or heard of such a dialog.

Usually when an application go rogue with the memory allocation.

MacOS has had protected memory since the public beta of OS X... I don't believe an app can do that.

I get this on an M1 Pro with 16GB. It's astounding. It claims to use swap but the trust is broken. I keep the Activity Monitor around and try to guess when it'll go flaky on me, but I never guess it right. I just restarted my machine now to reset whatever stupidity it has going on.

Never had it with Windows. Or iPad, or iPhone. Why does the pro computer do this? My guess is 5k external monitor and a few desktops, but...really. I'm not running multiple layers of VM's, it'll crash it with a few VS code windows, browsers, command lines.

There is an intermitted and basically unacknowleged memory leak in M1, which is supposedly addressed in M2. It also depends what app you're using - Logitech Options was somehow hogging top to 12gb on occasion, but was fixed sometime in the past few months.

So what you're saying is you're running multiple browsers (VS Code is a browser), each of which takes anywhere from 1 to several GB of memory, and you're surprised that you're running out of RAM...

Correct. I often have hundreds of browser tabs open on my iPhone, but it knows how to manage resources by unloading the ones I'm not looking at right now. The Mac can also swap tabs or apps to disk. Or warn me when I hit 90%. The only wrong option is to start freezing when it's too late. I'm a software developer who has been coding for decades, and I'm surprised by this failure mode. What would a random non-techie need to learn to reason about this? It's not like Macs are marketed only to technical professionals who keep an eye on resources.

Look, at least the Apple is smart enough to wake up basically in the same window state after having refreshed the resources. That's fantastic. But even better to fix it without going through the whole "have you turned it off and on again" routine.

> I often have hundreds of browser tabs open on my iPhone, but it knows how to manage resources by unloading the ones I'm not looking at right now. The Mac can also swap tabs or apps to disk.

Different models of computing. The iPhone only displays one tab inside one application at a time. And switching is slow enough that the OS can prefetch the swapped memory for the new view. A desktop app usually keeps everything alive as switching is very random and instantaneous. And you don't go open things that require a lot of RAM when you don't have that many (Each electron app is a whole new browser which is already a resource hog)

I've been using basic Windows laptops for work for many years now, and have never once had it ask me to start terminating applications.