on your computer right now there are sneaky little things that are eating up your computer's ram and
this is even before you open up any app on your computer this can cause major memory pressure and
slows down your computer's performance and in this video i'll show you what the culprits are and how
to manage it i'm rafael and welcome to the channel where our goal is to always fix it in camera
and then finesse it in post and there is nothing worse than your computer slowing down when you
are in a creative flow this is something that i advocate for to have a system that will keep up
with you and not the other way around and to ultimately get as much ram as you can afford
but even with more ram your system can still be bogged down sometimes as soon as you start it up
most people are familiar with memory hogs such as after effects photoshop premiere final cut
pro and other creative apps that will take as much ram as you have on your system but a lot of time
it's the background processes that eat up a good chunk of your ram even before opening up anything
for example on a fresh boot up on my system it's already idling between five to seven gigabytes
and this is with having none of the apps that i actually use open this ram is being eaten up
by all the startup processes so if you had an eight gigabyte system there would only be three
gigs of actual ram to use for everything else and on a 16 gigabyte system there would be just enough
to handle everything but i'll talk about why a little bit later in the video now granted this
is my system that has five gigabytes on startup what about other people surely my system is unique
well i did a poll on youtube instagram and twitter and i also canvassed everyone that i knew
and the vast majority all were around the same memory pressure just on boot up there were a few
that were below the three gigabyte memory pressure but all of them didn't use any of the heavy apps
like photoshop after effects premiere final cut or davinci meaning they didn't have adobe creative
cloud which has many small apps that launch at startups or another big app that they didn't use
is dropbox which itself almost uses two gigabytes just as you start up your system but even still
with the minimum startup apps that means that the os is eating up around 3 gigabytes of ram just by
itself and on an 8 gig system that's nearly half and most apps have 4 gigs of minimum recommended
system requirements and most creative apps today require 16 gigs of system memory as the minimum
after effects is notorious for hogging ram and as soon as you open up the app the memory pressure
jumps up and if you start previewing a comp it will eat up as much ram as you allow it to
it's good to know that you can purge a lot of the after effects memory from the ram with final
cut the same thing happens the memory pressure jumps significantly and this happens with every
app that you open so depending on which apps you use just know that each one will use as much ram
as you can give it so can you see how this can become a problem very quickly now i know that
there is swap memory that plays a huge part in lower ram systems and this is where the os tries
its best to keep processes going and uses the ssd as a ram substitute but the ssd is not as fast as
the ram and on modern systems today ram is up to 100 times faster than the ssd with read and write
ram is the memory that pretty much is directly accessed by the cpu and for tasks the cpu is
doing to keep functioning smoothly the response time has to be quick ram even older ddr ram
is measured in nanoseconds where ssds are measured in milliseconds ram is faster cool
so now how do we ensure that we're using the most of it for what we need and keep the memory
pressure down the goal should be to keep ram in play and avoid swap memory as much as possible
so the first thing that anyone can do and this is an obvious answer is to buy as much ram as you can
afford that will fit into your system but that is only if you're considering or ready to buy a new
system right now so the second thing is to manage your apps to prioritize where and when the ram
is used safari and chrome are notorious big ram users especially if you have multiple tabs open
each tab is eating up ram that means a youtube page will try to load and store 500 megabytes or
higher for each tab so if you're not watching that youtube video put it into your watch later list
and close all those tabs this will free up lots of ram and reduce the swap memory that you're using
if you have dropbox installed and don't use it that often quit it if you don't need to have
it running and do all your syncing at night turn off all the apps that you're not currently using
even the small ones it may not seem like much but they all do add up and some of those small apps
can open up background processes that eat up even more ram another thing is to find out which apps
are actually starting up at launch and this is something that happens as you install the app it
just has it on as a default so you actually need to go digging and look for those apps that are
launching on startup that you don't actually use and you can find them in your system preferences
under users and groups under the login items tab turn off anything that you don't need you can also
check on the dock right click on the app icon select options turn off open at login another
thing that you can do is just do a hard reboot this typically will purge the ram and give you
a snappier system so if you're one of those people that loves to leave your computer on day after day
just know that a reboot may solve a lot of your problems and give you a smoother experience one of
the biggest reasons you want to avoid using swap memory as awesome as it is is that ram is so much
faster for the processes that you're doing and the more ram you can use for the apps that you need
it'll make your whole experience working with the computer much better swap memory is fantastic but
if you're using your ssd as ram and your projects are also on the ssd your computer will be fighting
to which to prioritize to grab your project or to grab the other processes that it needs
and this is another thing that can slow down your system if you've managed your apps and your ram
but you're still experiencing memory pressure often it may be time to consider an upgrade
and this video may help you decide between the mac mini and the mac studio and which
is best for you also i live stream on my second channel where i deep dive on the creative process
as well as freelance financials so make sure you check that out as always thanks for watching