On 25/08/2019 12:51, D.M. Procida wrote:

You can check your current usage by running the 'top' command in
terminal. (Ctrl-c to terminate it).
You should get a summary block something like this:
Processes: 291 total, 2 running, 289 sleeping, 986 threads
12:04:46
Load Avg: 1.56, 1.51, 1.52 CPU usage: 2.89% user, 2.89% sys, 94.20% idle
SharedLibs: 373M resident, 67M data, 51M linkedit.
MemRegions: 29331 total, 1789M resident, 170M private, 736M shared.
PhysMem: 5109M used (1244M wired), 3082M unused.
VM: 1642G vsize, 1371M framework vsize, 0(0) swapins, 0(0) swapouts.
Networks: packets: 667284/622M in, 1361556/1229M out.
Disks: 125832/2744M read, 52476/837M written
This is from an 8GB RAM Macbook Air running Mojave, only lightly loaded.
The PhysMem line shows 5GB used and 3GB free for the physical RAM. The
VM line shows no swaps in or out as no swap needed (obviously).
If (with your typical load) you are currently exceeding 8GB then you
will definitely notice it - not so much as in the new machine will be
slower but the expected improvement won't be as much as you might hope.
If you can mostly work within 8GB, or you have lots of apps open but
have a few regular ones and the rest are mostly in the background, then
8GB with some swapping (to the really quite fast SSD in modern Macs)
won't be intolerable.
HTH
--
Bruce Horrocks
Surrey
England
(bruce at scorecrow dot com)