Lately, my Mac has been a bit slow — it seems due to a lack of memory. Out of 32 GB, 26 are typically occupied, and it occasionally seems to peak at 32. I’ve dumped all the processes that run on my typical day. In total, that’s about 600 processes.
Out of these 600 processes, a whopping 464 are system processes that come with MacOS Ventura. Probably, some of them, which Apple considers default for some reason, could be disabled, such as Spotlight or Siri. And probably I will do just that, but for now, here they are.
And these 464 processes occupy 7.2 GB of memory. That means, on a machine with 8 GB of memory, I don’t really understand what’s left.
These processes are interesting to study. For example, the process photoanalysisd is used for analyzing photos and videos, specifically for recognizing faces and objects for search purposes (spotlight?). It’s kind of creepy that the OS recognizes something in my photos on the disk.
Or there’s the process contactsdonationagent. In short, the system sends various things from your computer for research purposes, not only to Apple but through Apple to other organizations. Possibly, this can be disabled through Share Mac Analytics in Privacy & Security.
For instance, among the processes, there is the DoNotDisturb server. A very interesting server indeed 🙂
Second place in terms of memory consumption (and often CPU) goes to IntelliJ Idea. It’s my work tool, hosting a large Java project or even multiple projects. Typically, Idea occupies about 6GB of memory. That’s quite a lot, but unfortunately, there’s no viable alternative. It seems because Idea keeps a search index in memory, and I have tens of thousands of files in my project.
In third place are the browsers. I use Brave and Chromium. Brave is currently consuming 2GB. If there are a lot of tabs, it goes up to 4GB. Chromium takes another gigabyte. Two browsers are necessary because some services – like Microsoft, particularly the browser-based Teams, only allow one user per browser. As a result, I have one Teams in Brave, another in Chromium, and a third as an app. However, with browsers, it’s the easiest — I just completely kill them through Force Quit and reload them. Almost always there’s nothing to lose, and ForceQuit works instantly, unlike a normal exit.
Microsoft products consume another 3.5 GB. Of this, Outlook consumes about a gigabyte, so does Excel, and the rest goes to Microsoft Teams. Most likely, it’s because Teams brings its own browser.
Then there’s Spotify, consuming 600MB in passive mode. Need to uninstall it. For some reason, I installed the DeepL translator, which eats another 400MB — although it’s just as good in its browser version.
And then there’s the troublesome Telegram. Why does it need so much memory? It can easily occupy up to 2GB after a few days in the background. But you reboot it (better with cache clearing), and it then only consumes about 130 MB, and it stays that way for some time. Should set up an automatic reboot every night.
In the end, it seems I need to buy the next laptop with 64 GB of memory..
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 