"Once again, the system began doing its job and paging out before I ever hit that 16GB max. At this point, I stopped launching applications and documents.Conclusion, again, is that it takes an enormous amount of work to burn up 16GB of RAM on your MacBook Pro, unless you’re running a lot of poorly written apps that hog memory, have bloatware running at startup, or possibly doing a lot of advanced, high-end video editing (which I hope to experiment with at some point). Activity Monitor is a great way to see what’s chewing on your system, and a good starting point for figuring out what apps are causing problems for you."