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I decided to put 32 GB of Ram in my home desktop some months back. I knew I didn’t need that much, but I figured macOS (it’s a Hackintosh) would use it for file caching or some such.

To my disappointment, it goes completely unused more often than not. According to Activity Monitor, I currently have around 7 gb just sitting idle.

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Does Activity Monitor report the page cache/UBC size? Most of the time, basically all of the memory I'm not using directly is filled with page cache. The other big thing large memory typically does for me is delay GC in the JVM.

Typically the only time I use enough memory that my working files don't fit in the page cache along with the application memory, is when I build Android.

It's possible you just don't have that much on your disk that you use.

As of right now, 5.2 GB of RAM are being used for "Cached Files" according to Activity Monitor (still 25/32 GB in use overall).

In my experience windows utilizes ram much better. It will cache programs and data at times it anticipates you will use them. For example it will cache outlook at 9 am in the morning because that's the time I check my email.

At all times only a very small fraction of my ram is free.

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