Same boat here, I'm back to the original 4gb of ram on my mac till I can rma my other sticks. I let it run overnight and I came back to 40 GB of swap according to the activity monitor... I've now launched with the command line and am trying to limit the cache size... not quite sure if it is working though, swap is slowly growing... I was also under the impression that the --fast option was effectively a p2p download and reduced the verification. This part of the setup is definitely not good, I may try to restore an old setup from a backup before my reinstall to see if I can get the sync to not be as memory intensive. For ethereum they will need to develop some sort of distributed pruning if they want to have the blockchain companies (companies pay for the storage that they use, otherwise they are pruned) because these companies will lead to extra bloat... that and ram prices aren't dropping as fast as storage prices so there needs to be some changes in that department.