macos memory usage incorrect

[k2662]

the reported memory usage is lower than shown in activity monitor.

[Gobidev]

How much do they differ? Can you provide examples?

[k2662]

How much do they differ? Can you provide examples?

by up to 3GB. like: if actual was 12GB then it would show 9.3GB

[k2662]

Any update?

[Gobidev]

@k2662 Can you provide a screenshot of the memory usage reported by the activity monitor along with running vm_stat in a terminal? There are multiple options of what to count as used memory so it would be interesting to see what the activity monitor uses.

I don't own any device running macOS so testing is somewhat difficult. What I tried is running the libmacchina readouts and vm_stat on a macOS GitHub runner here, where the free memory reported by libmacchina approximately matches the free and inactive pages of vm_stat combined:

libmacchina:
reported free: 3330848 [kB] = 3410788352 Bytes

vm_stat:
reported free: 26076 [Pages] = 427229184 Bytes (1 Page = 16384 Bytes)
reported inactive: 183623 [Pages] = 3008479232 Bytes
free + inactive = 3435708416 Bytes

[k2662]

@k2662 Can you provide a screenshot of the memory usage reported by the activity monitor along with running vm_stat in a terminal? There are multiple options of what to count as used memory so it would be interesting to see what the activity monitor uses.

I don't own any device running macOS so testing is somewhat difficult. What I tried is running the libmacchina readouts and vm_stat on a macOS GitHub runner here, where the free memory reported by libmacchina approximately matches the free and inactive pages of vm_stat combined:

libmacchina:
reported free: 3330848 [kB] = 3410788352 Bytes

vm_stat:
reported free: 26076 [Pages] = 427229184 Bytes (1 Page = 16384 Bytes)
reported inactive: 183623 [Pages] = 3008479232 Bytes
free + inactive = 3435708416 Bytes

[k2662]

Is this not being fixed?

[grtcdr]

Perhaps @123marvin123 can help us with this issue :)

[123marvin123]

I believe this happens because Activity Monitor includes compressed memory as used memory. There are some discrepancies in how different apps report this metric. "iStat Menus" includes also the compressed memory, but many command line tools (e.g. https://github.com/giampaolo/psutil) do not.

So I'm not sure what is the best approach.