I have 16GB on my Mac and half of it goes to a virtual machine. And I’m definitely a heavy user - five browser windows open with who knows how many tabs is pretty common. An IDE or even two, plus all sorts of other stuff, and a bunch of electron apps too.
MacOS definitely uses “all of the memory”, but often at least a few gigabytes (as in, almost half my memory aside from the VM) is dedicated to caching files on disk. And with a fast SSD that’s not buying you much performance.
The big difference I noticed with the extra memory is that my browser tabs don’t get cached, and programs I haven’t used in a long time are still responsive instantly (i.e. they also weren’t cached.)
On what operating system?
I have 16GB on my Mac and half of it goes to a virtual machine. And I’m definitely a heavy user - five browser windows open with who knows how many tabs is pretty common. An IDE or even two, plus all sorts of other stuff, and a bunch of electron apps too.
MacOS definitely uses “all of the memory”, but often at least a few gigabytes (as in, almost half my memory aside from the VM) is dedicated to caching files on disk. And with a fast SSD that’s not buying you much performance.
Windows 11.
The big difference I noticed with the extra memory is that my browser tabs don’t get cached, and programs I haven’t used in a long time are still responsive instantly (i.e. they also weren’t cached.)