Except... when apps are using a lot more memory than they do on other OS, you tend to get a low-memory situation anyway.

If I've got a 4gig machine, and running 5 apps takes up 3.8 gig, trying to run another app with necessitate swapping/paging some of the existing apps around to accommodate my new app. If those initial 5 apps only took up, say, 2.8g, I'd have less chance of hitting 'low-memory' situations in the first place.

I say this as someone with 16g mbp and SSD who still hits beach balls and unexplained pauses on a daily basis. Fewer than I used to, but it gets annoying. Not quite as annoying as win95/2k blue screens of 12+ years ago, but getting my ire up.

Beach ball is not necessarily a low memory warning (or memory related). It's showed (only) when a GUI application fails to respond to UI events. Sometimes it's because of bad threading in applications or things like that.

understood they're not always the same thing - I often see a beachball with 6gig free, which used to perplex me a bit, now it just bugs me. :/

If you're interested in seeing what's happening, fire up Activity Monitor and hit Sample on the app when you see the beach ball. It records the call frames of all threads a couple of thousand times over a few seconds, so you can see what that app is waiting for.

If the entire system has ground to a halt such that it's difficult to actually get to Activity Monitor to do the sample, then it's likely to be a memory problem. If it's just one app, it's probably something else.

If the system is hung such that you can't get Activity Monitor to sample, use command-option-control-shift-period to run sysdiagnose. Attach the resulting /var/tmp/sysdiagnose_$(TIME).tar.gz to your bug report.

And inside that tar.gz file is a spindump.txt file, which will have the samples of whatever application is spinning at the moment, just like if you used Activity Monitor to sample it.

I had never heard about it... Wonderful.

... and report the bug to the app's developer! Be sure to include the sample.

good idea - upvoted! :)

Odd - I've been using an 8 gig mbp with swap disabled and I've yet to crash due to running out of ram. That's running a few browsers, editors, VM instances, possibly photoshop for some tweaking. Beachballs are very rare and would be due to software errors, not out of memory conditions - those would just crash.