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A comment on New iMac with M4. Parent comment
Some RAM is used for file caching and other optional stuff, so not all of the additional usage will translate into swap if RAM is reduced.
MacOS also makes use of RAM compression, which increases the amount of memory pressure that can be sustained before swapping is necessary.
All in all, it's pretty complicated, and the only way to know if a workload will perform acceptably on a machine with less RAM is to try it.
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Some RAM is used for file caching and other optional stuff, so not all of the additional usage will translate into swap if RAM is reduced.
MacOS also makes use of RAM compression, which increases the amount of memory pressure that can be sustained before swapping is necessary.
All in all, it's pretty complicated, and the only way to know if a workload will perform acceptably on a machine with less RAM is to try it.