Setting max available memory - best practice?

I’m running Processing 3 on my new MacBook Pro with an Apple M1 Max processor and 32 GB of memory. And I’m wondering if I should be setting Processing’s memory settings to be something other than the default.

I see in preferences there’s an option to ‘increase maximum available memory’ – it’s unchecked, and the default value is 512MB. Should I be setting this – perhaps to several gigs?

When I run a sketch, I see with the Activity Monitor app that the sketch is using 1 GB.

Is there some best practice, or recommendation, for this?

Thanks,

david,

Unless you are loading in thousands of images, sound files, or video files or processing large-scale databases, it’s unlikely that you would need anywhere near to 512 MB of data. If, at some point, you are dealing with specifically large data, then you’ll know where to look to raise it. Otherwise, there is no need to change it.

If the sketch appears to be using more memory, it’s most likely counting system video memory buffers that are not counted in that Processing memory limit.

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