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And then you may get competition for resources. The operating system may have allocated, say 12 GB for the GPU, and then suddenly LrC needs 10. And it doesn't get it, because the OS won't release it.
By @D Fosse
It isn’t that simple. Although I’m not technical enough to explain all the details, one major factor is that Apple Silicon Unified Memory allocations between OS and graphics are said to be far more dynamic and flexible than Intel Integrated Graphics shared memory, so that it is not correct to assume that they operate with the same limitations.
In the scenario you mentioned, most of the time macOS will have options for dynamically reallocating memory so that ths OS in fact can release it for the process that requests it. It should be relatively rare that the OS is actually unable to release enough memory. This is how I can end up with 20 or 30 icons for running apps in the Application Switcher, including Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, and one or two Adobe video apps, but memory usage is reported to be completely OK and things are working fast.
And all of that does not apply to this discussion, because in this thread Lightroom Classic or macOS is not handling memory properly. It’s more about memory management bugs that need to be fixed, not about the design of Windows or Mac memory management. And it’s not about having insufficient memory, because many of the systems have 32GB or more.
In the end we do agree that for Creative Cloud, 16GB should be considered the minimum level for a Mac or PC, and 32GB is recommended especially for someone who wants accommodate occasional larger jobs or use the computer for more years before upgrading.
…it seems that a MAC user can be happy with only 16 GB ram. Is there really such a great difference between Windows and MAC with regard to this issue with Lightroom memory usage?
By @steveisa054
I am a very dedicated Mac user, and yet, I have to say that is an oversimplification that is partially, but certainly not always, true. Personally I recommend 32GB memory for someone getting their next Mac or PC for Creative Cloud work.
Things did change a little when Apple switched the entire Mac line from Intel processors to their own new Apple Silicon processor. There are some architectural processor differences that do use memory somewhat more efficiently. For example, there are tasks that everybody agrees are not advisable on Intel with 8GB RAM, but when people tried those tasks on the first Apple Silicon Macs with 8GB memory, those tasks had acceptable, or even good, performance. However, that is not always true, especially when large data sets need to be held in memory (these tend to be programming/data science tasks that Creative Cloud users never do); if you do something that really needs 16GB then the computer needs to have 16GB.
As for whether Mac users never see memory problems, that is not true. Below are some relatively recent links on this forum from Mac users puzzled by mysteriously high memory usage with Lightroom Classic, describing it much like the Windows users do.
I have not had those kinds of problems with Lightroom Classic, but I recently had a similar problem with Adobe Premiere Pro on my Mac, where the claimed memory usage was several times the actual memory installed. (That is possible because of the way modern memory systems use compressed memory and virtual memory.) Eventually the program ground to a halt.
Adobe has been working on Lightroom Classic memory management in recent updates, and I think there may be fewer reports than there used to be. But there are still reports, so the problem might not be completely solved. The point is that it is incorrect to assume that Macs never have these problems. The solution is not to buy a Mac, but for Adobe to fix any remaining memory management bugs.
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