Increased RAM usage after macOS Sonoma update on MacBook Pro 16

RAM usage is dynamic. The set of daemon processes running may have changed. The amount of RAM used by the filesystem cache at that instance in time may be higher. The kernel_task may be using new internal structures. It could be any number of things.

I would not worry about it, because understanding modern operating system virtual memory dynamics is almost a PhD level of college study.

I completely agree with @BobHarris.

Keep in mind anything you have configured to run at boot or login will consume memory. Most people don't realize some apps they install may launch some components automatically in the background during boot. Plus after an update/upgrade the system & apps may be doing lots of setup/configuration to deal with the update/upgrade.

Plus if you are concerned about 2GB of RAM being used, then that tells me you did not purchase a computer with a sufficient amount of memory for your workloads. Part of that fault is on Apple for selling a system with just 8GB of RAM until just recently....that was only Ok for people that would just have a few browser windows/tabs open and very basic usage.

saish_08 wrote:

I have the 16GB model, but even then, that extra 2GB slows down my work.

No it doesn't. As previously stated, RAM use is dynamic and will change as necessary.

If your computer is running slow it is because of other reasons such as running unneeded third party apps such as anti virus apps or apps that claim to protect, clean, manage, etc.

Post an etrecheck report so that we can see what may be contributing to the slow performance.