Why is my MacBook's RAM showing high usage with nothing open?

Etrecheck:

Consider downloading and running this little "discovery" utility, Etrecheck. It changes NOTHING. Etrecheck was developed by senior contributor here, and uses system calls to collect often-needed information.

it contains little tests for speeds of devices, CPU utilization, memory usage, energy usage and a digest of recent problems, in one easy to use package. it does not even need to be Installed. Because less can be learned when your Mac is running great, best time to run is when your problems are actually occurring, if possible.

if you follow the directions faithfully, its report (pre-laundered of all personally-identifiable information) can be "Shared" to the System ClipBoard, then Pasted into an ‘Additional Text’ window in a reply on the forums.

Use Etrecheck Pro for free:

http://Etrecheck.com

then PASTE the clipboard into an 'additional text' window on the forums:

My RAM shows almost 10GB occupied with literally nothing open besides the activity monitor..

Please post a screenshot of that entire Activity Monitor window. It will show what literally nothing is comprised of.

if you would like to make those numbers look better, do a Restart. Then they will start from defaults with no cached files and no swap used.

But of course once you start to do things, those numbers will go up again.

S.3renity wrote:

I have 2TB hard drive space and 1TB in use

Maybe not. Users are regularly surprised when they discover how storage is really being used. Unless you know the exact places to look, what the system is telling you about your storage is likely to be a total fabrication.

You described memory errors when running memory-hungry apps. Usually this is because you've run out of storage space for swap files.

Almost all those programs you see in the Activity Monitor window are what is using up the "App Memory" part of the Memory Used stat. Wired Memory is memory that belongs to the kernel and cannot ever be paged out to disk. Compressed memory is App Memory currently not in use and compressed in RAM to minimize the space consumed in RAM until it is need again.

Your memory use in RAM is perfectly fine.

The memory pressure image in your original post and the memory pressure at the bottom of the image in the post I responded to are almost identical (which, by the way, shows many, many programs open in Activity Monitor - just not opened by you).

the moment I use Premiere Pro and for example Safari (just two programs) I get a message about heavily use of RAM..

Is outside the scope of your original question - and when you obliquely referred to it earlier, you got advice that it might be due to an overly full hard drive. Given that video editing does try to write intermediate files to disk because the editing tends to affect larger blocks - and if it can't then a lot of RAM must be allocated - this is sensible advice.

I understand you disagree with that advice. It's relatively easy to test - take one of those screenshots of Activity monitor while you are running these programs and have a "heavy RAM use" warning in effect. See what the memory allocation and swap, etc looks like in that scenario. It's rather hard to diagnose without diagnostic data...

What issue do you have? Why would you not want to use all your RAM? Unused RAM is wasted RAM. The pressure gauge show in the green which indicates there is no problem.

You have 32 GB of total RAM and only 30% of that is used. The Memory Pressure graph is all green.

I see no issue there with RAM usage.

S.3renity wrote:

When I use abode premiere and Photoshop, I start having warnings popping out about RAM

Your hard drive is probably full.