Is there an app to see exactly where my RAM is getting used up?
No not Activity Monitor. I have to explain what happened today. So today I was sharing my screen on a Zoom call and my cursor started moving slowly and turned into a beach ball and the call froze. I had one browser opened with 10 tabs and 7 of them in suspended state - regular sites like Gemini, youtube, and wikipedia. On activity monitor the browser is using 609 MB of RAM but memory cleaner by Nektony shows it's using 2.74 GB of RAM. I had another browser that was just opened with no tabs and spotify app was running. That's it. Other than that there's just background apps on the menu bar like one drive, google drive, shottr, Thock, Unclutter, Bitwarden, Raycast, and a live wallpaper app - yeah these are only using 10 MB or so of RAM each except Unclutter using around 386 MB in activity monitor and 500 MB shown in memory cleaner by Nektony, and the live wallpaper app using 192 MB in activity monitor and 600 MB shown in memory cleaner by Nektony. My question is how tf am I running out of RAM? I have 16 GB of RAM. Is 16 GB not enough for basic use cases now? I'm not even video editing or anything. Just doing what a Macbook Neo user would do and they got only 8 GB, I have 16 GB. I just want to know where my RAM is getting used up. I don't understand the discrepancy between Nektony and activity monitor. Activity monitor's stats don't show exactly how much RAM is available and the data is hard to interpret.
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Btop
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Sure please
ProcessSpy - Advanced process monitor for macOS
Stats https://mac-stats.com/
Your question is about is 16gb not enough. The short answer yes it is. As knowing many mac users, when was it you did a restart!? Are you running latest patch? What is the spec of your machine? M1 / M2 etc? Assume m2 at least? It could be a tab has crashed, what browser are you using? What is website you were at the time?
The short answer yes it is Sorry I didn't understand, are you saying 16 GB is not enough or are you saying it is enough for my use case? I did a restart 15 days ago. I'm on M2 Air. 8 core CPU, 8 core GPU, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 45 GB free SSD. No I checked the tabs only 3 are active and rest are suspended - i use a tab suspender extension. Regular websites like wikipedia, reddit, gemini, apple forums, university sites, company career sites, youtube - that's basically all that is open. I use Dia browser and Brave browser. Would move to Safari but it's missing a lot of features I regularly use.
Was it a memory problem or kernal_task throttling your CPU because items running hot? If it’s using more than 100% CPU see if you can cool it down, like open it if using in clamshell mode
You dont know how to read Activity Monitor then. From reading your post I counted 5 resource heavy things you had open already. Still, it shouldnt be causing your Mac to beachball.
Yes, we need something which can explain the RAM usage of non-app things too. And also categorise them as safe to free up or not. The activity monitor needs deeper knowledge to figure out the non app things. Also, I get confused when there are multiple browser process running and can’t figure out what to free up.
Activity Monitor is good for the first pass, but it hides a lot of the “why did my Mac feel stuck right now” story. I’d check Memory Pressure, swap used, and which browser/helper processes grew before the freeze. For AI apps especially, also watch model size, context length, and whether the app leaves the model loaded after the task. A small local model can feel fine; a long-context run can make the whole machine feel sick.
Hey, QA from Nektony here! Thanks for raising this - what you’re seeing makes sense, even though it looks confusing at first. -- Activity Monitor shows an app’s real/resident memory (RSS) - the physical RAM the process is actively using right now. -- Memory Cleaner shows a broader view of the app’s total memory footprint, which may include: • shared memory • compressed memory • cached memory • helper/background processes - and this is especially relevant for browsers: Chrome, Firefox and others spawn a separate process for each tab. Memory Cleaner adds all of them up under one parent process, while Activity Monitor may show only the main one. That’s why your browser shows 609 MB in Activity Monitor but 2.74 GB in Memory Cleaner. So, Activity Monitor and Memory Cleaner measure memory differently. As a result, numbers won’t always match. One of Memory Cleaner’s advantages is that you see apps sorted by highest memory usage, so you can immediately spot the heaviest apps first instead of digging through Activity Monitor. Also, on macOS, high RAM usage alone isn’t a problem. What matters most is Memory Pressure and Swap: • if Memory Pressure turns yellow/red, • or Swap starts growing significantly, that’s when your Mac can slow down or show the spinning beach ball, like during your Zoom call. And 16 GB is still enough for typical use.
https://coffeebreak.pages.dev/one-menu/ One menu. It does a whole lot of other things too, but it does exactly what you asked
There’s a new one I haven’t tried called TK-Mac. Could be good. https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSApps/comments/1sjbhyw/i_built_a_simple_task_manager_for_macos_because/ https://www.tk-mac.com/
Found this one recently, so far so good even it’s in early phase.
The new version of app tamer does. It shows ram and cpu. Its the beta version and it’s aweosme
any native menu bar app for looking all the device stats that free ?
Yeah you need to dig deep.. could be signs that you have something running on ur system that you thought you closed.
I use CleanMyMac menu bar if you want it simple.
Why do you think the issue was lack of RAM?
Istat menus
macOS counts cached and compressed memory differently, so cleaner apps often inflate numbers. activity monitor’s memory pressure graph is usually the more reliable signal tbh
Btop
Activity Monitor is still the thing I’d trust here, but it helps to read it a little differently. Browsers scatter memory across tabs, extensions, GPU/helper processes, so the one “browser” row rarely tells the whole story. In Activity Monitor, try View > All Processes, Hierarchically, search for the browser, and look at the whole group. For the Zoom/screen-share freeze, I’d watch Memory Pressure, Swap Used, CPU, and anything involved in capture/rendering: Zoom, browser helpers, live wallpaper, screen recorder bits. If pressure is green, the scary GB number probably isn’t the cause. If you want a smaller always-visible check than Activity Monitor, Better Resource Monitor is useful for seeing “is pressure or CPU climbing right now?” in the menu bar. I’d treat it as a smoke alarm, not a cleaner.
So much insane here