Under Applications/Utilities you will find Activity Monitor, Apple’s integrated process monitor. By default, the program starts in the “CPU” tab – this shows the utilization of the computing cores. The second tab called “Memory” then shows which process is using how much RAM – the hungriest ones appear at the top. If necessary, use the “Display” menu to switch to “All processes, hierarchical” in order to identify browser tabs with excessive demand. In the lower area, a helpful graphic shows what the current RAM usage is.
The Activity Monitor memory tab sorts processes according to memory requirements.
Stats or iStat for the menu bar
Using an additional program, you can keep an eye on RAM and other resource usage without keeping the activity display in the foreground. The free Stats and the inexpensive iStat Menus display a configurable collection of utilization data in the menu bar; Clicking on the respective value then reveals a list of the most active processes.
Stats makes it easy to monitor the RAM requirements of various programs.
Apps and browser tabs
In many cases, memory leaks in third-party apps or particularly memory-hungry browser content are the cause of low RAM. The browser itself usually has control over the latter and reloads a page. For programs, you should first save the open documents and close windows. This resolves a problem in many cases, explains Howard Oakley in a post on memory management. In his experience, memory leaks have become rare in recent years; In his experience, there are two Apple programs that tend to require a lot of RAM: Pages and Mail. If restarting the program (after saving your progress) doesn’t help, Oakley recommends restarting your Mac. If you see a reproducible error, Oakley recommends you report it to the developer.
Kernel memory leak
If the operating system itself is the cause, users have few options for finding clues. Oakley recommends a command line command:
sudo zprint
reveals (after entering the administrator password) a long list of RAM memory areas, which the system calls Mach zones. However, this only helps a user to a limited extent. A kernel memory leak usually manifests itself in the form of a kernel panic – there is a separate recommended procedure for this rare exception.