MacBook – is this swap memory use normal

m1macbook promemory

I got myself a m1 macbook air with 8 gb of ram
Ive been using it for a month now and noticed that my swap usage is unusally high, is that something to worry about?

As you can see from the screenshot swap is around 3 gigs, and it hasnt gone done down yet.

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I was hoping that 8 gigs was enough for vscode and node but now I doubt it

Also, my ram usage in the activity monitor always peaks at 6.6-6.7 gigs, never goes up more than that.

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labels are: all ram, used ram, cache, swap

Should I be concerned?

Best Answer

So long as memory pressure looks OK, there's nothing to worry about.

macOS keeps things cached in RAM as long as that RAM is not needed by anything else - that gives it a tendency overall to look like it fills up & never empties.

The same can be said of swap. It fills, the contents may change, but the swap figure displayed is always a "high tide" figure. You never see it go down until you reboot.

It doesn't serve you or the OS well at all if it were to periodically flush unused RAM or swap just to "look tidier". Its purpose is best served by it just hanging onto it all in case it's needed again.

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