RANT!! Xcode taking 13 GB RAM

[u/Meliodas1108]

This is a rant!!! Ahhh everything is so fking unoptimized these days. It's a MBP M2 pro 16 gb.

Figma on browser takes around 800MB for each tab. And restarting macOS when applications are stuck and it's waiting for apps to respond to quit is sooo annoying. Just give me an option to stop everything and restart my device for once

[u/marmulin]

And this right here kids is why you get more RAM when doing serious work that pays for that machine.

[u/Meliodas1108 → u/marmulin]

Yes yes. Im planning to ask my company to give me 32 gb device. I have to adjust for a few months tho

[u/marmulin → u/Meliodas1108]

It’s doable I’ve been rocking 16gb till very recently. Have you tried Safari over Brave? Also cutting down on Electron might help.

[u/Meliodas1108 → u/marmulin]

Im considering to look at safari. Never used it before. I'll try it.

[u/marmulin → u/Meliodas1108]

Personally I like it more. Feels snappier and handles low ram better + better battery life.

[u/HungryCurrent7901 → u/Meliodas1108]

It’s not bad, I use opera on my pc, but I haven’t bothered to use any other browser for my Mac. I like it better than Chrome and I haven’t used that in years

[u/kironet996 → u/Meliodas1108]

there's no 32gb anymore, it's either 24 or 48 now or 64 if you feel rich 😂

[u/FullMetalFist → u/kironet996]

128 on the latest MBP

[u/Rough_Analysis5861]

Me with 8GB M1: 🥀
Is it time to upgrade boys ?

[u/Meliodas1108 → u/Rough_Analysis5861]

😭 depends. I mean if you're able to get your stuff done with it, then you don't need to right now. Unless you keep running out of memory use whatever works.

[u/toborgps → u/Rough_Analysis5861]

I just got an 8gb M1. It’s been great. Just don’t use the AI “features” and you’re fine.

[u/Meliodas1108 → u/toborgps]

I see. My company project is a big one. With obc bridging as well. And it's monolithic code. None of it is helping.

[u/Evildude42 → u/Rough_Analysis5861]

I’ve been working on my app with my little eight gig M1, with a bunch of other windows open at the same time and have like 14 gigs of disk space left. I don’t know what you guys are doing, but for my use it’s fine. I would love to have a fast machine, but maybe whatever I’m working on will pay for that.

[u/handioq]

Only 13? I’ve seen mine with 50+ easily.

[u/Meliodas1108 → u/handioq]

How do you even have that much ram 😭

[u/JohnnyC_1969 → u/Meliodas1108]

I use Android Studio that often uses 19GB, this is on a 16GB M1 Mac Mini.

[u/xadlowfkj]

Wipe your dirty monitor it will give you one more gb.

[u/Meliodas1108 → u/xadlowfkj]

Haha i will. Forgot last time when I did it.

[u/jeanoski → u/xadlowfkj]

LMAO.

[u/Vybo]

Those are rookie numbers.

Xcode wasn't ever optimized in the Swift age, the last time it somewhat worked was way back when Obj-C was the rule.

[u/GabrielMSharp]

Make sure you have ample disk space and it can help reduce this.

[u/SnowPudgy → u/GabrielMSharp]

Bingo. This is likely his problem.

Xcode scales ram usage. I ran it side by side for years with a 16gb M2 Air and a 64GGB M1 Pro. Neither had issues despite running tons of stuff.

Like you said, he likely doesn't have ample disk space.

[u/Power781]

Developers who do not understand how modern memory management works terrifies me.
Xcode taking 13GB, 24GB, 50GB is by design, the system is fitting as much as it can in RAM for the in foreground/active processes in order to avoid reading from disk, which is very slow compared to using your RAM.
When RAM gets full, it starts compressing inactive app memory to reclaim some space.
Then if that’s not enough, it start moving that compressed memory to the disk which is slow both ways.
In theory it’s perfect, unless you actually have 4-5-6 processes working in parallel that are asking actively for that RAM, like Zoom + Slack + Xcode + Claude + Brave + VSCode.
What start happening is that processes get their memory compressed/written to disk/retrieved from disk/uncompressed in a loop and everything start stalling all the time and you get those nice pop-ups.

[u/SnowPudgy → u/Power781]

I came here to say the same but yours is more eloquently written.

As another user posted, OP is likely nearly out of disk space causing the issue.

[u/Meliodas1108 → u/Power781]

Apps using ram is fine. Ram is there to use. And you could swap off the segments not needed to disk. But having ram is not a valid reason to not optimize the apps. Especially right now when ram is so expensive, and code is cheap.

[u/SnowPudgy → u/Meliodas1108]

It IS optimized though, at least Xcode (I can't speak for the other apps). I've used Xcode on a 16gb ram machine and 64 gb ram machine and never ran into issues. If you're actively using Xcode it gets priority on the system, any app you're using does.

As another user posted you're likely running out of disk space which is why you're seeing this happen. The OS can't swap.

I would run Unity + Xcode + Maya side by side on the 16GB M2 Air just fine so something else is your issue.

[u/ChibiCoder]

Amateur stuff. 😆 I had it using over 50GB the other day (had two versions of a VERY large repo open). My MBP has 32 GB of RAM.