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My Macbook has 4GB RAM. Lately it often starts swapping, which is obviously not so great.

Firefox usually takes a huge amount (~ 1GB) which is kind of to be expected. Nevertheless, after booting it up (no applications running so far) the memory baseline is already at ~ 1.5 GB. So although I am quite conservative with not running too many applications at once, 4 GB seem not to suffice.

  • Are these numbers to be expected nowadays?
  • I have always upgraded my Late-2008 MacBook to the most recent version of OS X. Could it be that I experience some kind of bloat / fragmentation that is related to this?
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  • What numbers do you get for vm_stat 300 over 5 sample periods? Also post a memory pressure pic from Activity Monitor at the conclusion of the sample. Sort by real mem descending and show all processes. Getting to 2 GB at boot is not curious - what might be is the swap numbers once RAM is committed to all the apps you run.
    – bmike ♦
    Aug 16 '15 at 17:56
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Are these numbers to be expected nowadays?

Every new OS needs more RAM on its own than the older ones. That's because developers are always adding new features, which means they will need more RAM.

So yes, 1.5 GB RAM only for the system is absolutely normal, Windows 10 for example even needs 2 GB.

I have always upgraded my Late 2008 Notebook to the most recent OS X version. Could it be that I experience some kind of bloat / fragmentation that is related to this?

I don't think that the updates themselves are causing problems, but simply the newer systems aren't designed to run with only 4GB of RAM, which means that you have to think about always updating to the latest OS.

Of course it will run, but maybe it needs to much resources if you want to run many programs at the same time.

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