I started 10 years with with 8GB RAM and quickly realized it was too little, then upgraded to 16gb. This worked for a while, but then my dev got more advanced (more docker containers, sims, etc). Then I moved up to 24gb and this became the new standard for me for a few years. It worked mostly, as long as I didn get greedy and tried to do something crazy like open apps that werent related to web dev work. I finally said "fuck it" and bought a 96GB Mac Studio so that if I want to open another app on top of my web dev resources, it can still work comfortably. Now, hte mac just uses more ram as it gets more. It thinks its being smart by using all the RAM to "cache" apps that arent even open so that they will open fast when/if I do ever open them. So now because of this "smart" feature, I am constantly red-lining on RAM, using fucking swap like a pleb, "force quit application" always launching asking me to force quit things. WTF is this bullshit? I take a look, and things are now just using retarded levels of RAM that it otherwise would not on a 24GB machine, like Chrome using 8GB, VS Code using 5GB, Ghostty (just a terminal app) using 6GB, docker now using 16GB etc. Let alone that even with this, it should not be using swap and there should still be free RAM, but of course its doing like 20GB in "cache" for unused apps. Can I turn this "smart feature" off?!

UPDATE: for the people saying "its a feature to use up all the RAM"/"unused RAM is wasted money", that is true, but the issues here are:
1) Chrome should never use 16gb (obviously unless I have thousands of tabs open), Ghostty shouldnt be using 6GB etc. I got more RAM so that I can do more things, not do the same things but have them take up more RAM.
2) It should not use swap when there is cache. It should prioritize releasing cache before resorting to swap. Also, for my use case, it should never have to resort to swap anyway, so again, its an issue of problem 1, and this problem of using cache when it is using swap. If there is 20GB in cache, there should not be 6GB of swap, it should instead be 14GB of cache and 0 swap. Swap kills performance and makes me have to force-quit things for the Mac to become responsive again.

submitted by /u/devshore
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