Well that’s fine, RAM is supposed to be full. You’re wasting it if it’s not full. If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps. (which tends to come up way too late, but whatever)

> If you’re really using too much, the system will either get horribly slow or you’ll get a dialog asking you to force quit apps.

Yes, she was getting both. To the point that I asked her to keep activity monitor running in the background so we could see who the problem applications were.

I'm not sure why this is in question.

Because "physical memory" being high in Activity Monitor doesn't actually tell you things that cause that dialog to appear. (Unfortunately.) That and a 1GB Firefox tab isn't quite enough to do it.

If "compressed" or "swap space" approach 32GB+/64GB+ (depends on amount of physical memory installed) that can do it, but running out of disk space is a more common problem.

Of course, quitting the top app in the memory list probably is going to fix the issue.

I literally just confirmed that she was getting force quit messages.

I had to have her leave activity monitor open in the corner because it was running so slow it wouldn't open.