{"id":38291,"date":"2023-01-26T15:44:56","date_gmt":"2023-01-26T20:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=38291"},"modified":"2025-03-17T11:30:54","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T15:30:54","slug":"what-happened-to-virtual-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/26\/what-happened-to-virtual-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happened to Virtual Memory?"},"content":{"rendered":"

alessandro308<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Your system has run out of application memory.<\/p>\n

To avoid problems with your computer, quit any applications you are not using.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Jason Koebler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

why do people pretend like RAM is somehow not important on Apple Silicon? I have a $2,000 14\" 2021 MBP with 16 gb RAM and I’m regularly getting notices my computer can’t run bc not enough system memory with not that much stuff open[…]<\/p>

meanwhile I have a 2017 iMac that I installed 32 gb of RAM on myself with a garbage processor but that generally runs large numbers of programs\/tabs better than this MBP.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

I’ve never quite known what this error means. I’ve been using macOS since the beginning and don’t recall ever seeing it until the later years of using my 2017 iMac. It had 40 GB of RAM, and when I would get this error it never seemed like applications were using a huge amount of memory. Sometimes it looked like the kernel was using 10 GB or so. Even so, how can the system be out of memory when it supports virtual memory and the boot drive has 100 GB of free space?<\/p>\n\n

Meanwhile, my 2022 MacBook Pro has only 32 GB of RAM, and I don’t think it has ever shown this error message. My guess is that this is because the MacBook Pro has a larger SSD and the iMac was in fact running out of space. Perhaps it’s just more confusion caused by displaying purgeable space—that will not actually be automatically purged—as though it’s free.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n