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Comment by ef4 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, I have been dreading the upcoming time when my pre-touchbar macbook pro is too old and I will check out these tips when it does.

One bit of feedback:

> RAM usage: Useless. In modern OS it's always nearly 100%. That's natural.

A good ram usage indicator is still really useful, and along with cpu and network usage it's one of the first things I install on any machine.

The issue is that your indicator needs to show you not just "how much is used vs free", which is indeed useless. It needs to show you the breakdown of wired, active, and inactive memory. This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.

I use https://member.ipmu.jp/yuji.tachikawa/MenuMetersElCapitan/

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I use gkrellm, and set the three memory krells option. The "usage" is memory actually used for application memory. The other krells mark how much cache and buffers are allocated. htop does something similar, green is application usage, blue is buffer usage and yellow/orange is filesystem cache (at least, as far as I know, I might be wrong)

edit: on linux. I would assume Mac and even windows have enough granularity to distinguish.

> This makes it clear when some app is starting to blow up and consume a huge amount.

And how often does that actually happen anymore, really? Yes, Chrome and friends are memory hogs, but a constant RAM indicator? If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.

Multiple times a week. And yes, Chrome and the Chrome-devilspawn (Slack) are frequently to blame, but are not the only bad actors.

I use iStat Menus for that stuff. Working without various monitors seems to me a lot like doing without speedometers and gas gauges.

> And how often does that actually happen anymore, really

Pretty often, especially if you open an app that decides to allocate a lot of memory very quickly (Xcode, VirtualBox) or when you switch to an app that causes a lot of memory to be swapped in.

But if I just started up one of those apps, I'm wanting (and expecting) it to allocate a lot of memory because that's what those apps do. So I don't really see what actionable information an always-visible meter does for me. But I don’t begrudge those who like them!

> And how often does that actually happen anymore, really?

Every few weeks to a few times a week depending what I'm working on/with.

> If a MacBook (or any other device for that matter) starts swapping, you'll know right away.

1. not necessarily, SSDs make swapping way less problematic than it used to be

2. ideally you want to nip the problematic process before it locks up the entire machine

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