View Memory Usage In Activity Monitor On Mac - Apple Support (MY)

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macOS Tahoe 26 macOS Sequoia 15 macOS Sonoma 14 macOS Ventura 13 macOS Monterey 12 macOS Big Sur 11.0 macOS Catalina 10.15 macOS Mojave 10.14 Select version: macOS Tahoe 26 macOS Sequoia 15 macOS Sonoma 14 macOS Ventura 13 macOS Monterey 12 macOS Big Sur 11.0 macOS Catalina 10.15 macOS Mojave 10.14 Modifying this control will update this page automatically Search this guide Clear Search Table of Contents

Activity Monitor User Guide

• Welcome
• View information about processes
• View CPU activity
• View GPU activity
• View memory usage
• View energy consumption
• View disk activity
• View network activity
• View cache activity
• Run system diagnostics
• Quit a process
• Change how often information is updated
• Check if your Mac needs more RAM
• Copyright and trademarks

You can see the amount of system memory being used on your Mac.

Open Activity Monitor for me

In the Activity Monitor app on your Mac, click Memory to see the following in the bottom of the window:

• Memory Pressure: Graphically represents how efficiently your memory is serving your processing needs.

  Memory pressure is determined by the amount of free memory, swap rate, wired memory and file cached memory.

• Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed.

• Memory Used: The amount of RAM being used. To the right, you can see where the memory is allocated.

  • App Memory: The amount of memory being used by apps.

  • Wired Memory: Memory required by the system to operate. This memory can’t be cached and must stay in RAM, so it’s not available to other apps.

  • Compressed: The amount of memory that has been compressed to make more RAM available.

    When your computer approaches its maximum memory capacity, inactive apps in memory are compressed, making more memory available to active apps. Select the Compressed Memory column, then look in the VM Compressed column for each app to see the amount of memory being compressed for that app.

• Cached Files: The size of files cached by the system into unused memory to improve performance.

  Until this memory is overwritten, it remains cached, so it can help improve performance when you reopen the app.

• Swap Used: The amount of space being used on your startup disk to swap unused files to and from RAM.

You can use Activity Monitor to determine if your Mac could use more RAM.

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