8 ms·
Such high swap usage sounds like a bug. But at the same time. 8GB of ram isn't a lot. Especially when multi tasking. I know there was a lot of talk about App
by Jonnax 6y ago
Such high swap usage sounds like a bug.
But at the same time. 8GB of ram isn't a lot.
Especially when multi tasking.
I know there was a lot of talk about Apple's directly soldered RAM being super efficient.
But if you've got 30 tabs open, playing music and using Photoshop. No amount of optimisation is going to prevent swap usage.
Still though. Terrabytes of usage must be a bug.
- spideymans 6y agoApparently the issue affects the 16 GB models as well. In that case, the SSD wear likely would not be related to the limited RAM in the 8 GB model.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoPresumably people getting 16GB of RAM are also running more memory intensive workloads than those not shelling out for the upgrade, so it could be a non-factor.
- post_break 6y ago16GB ram M1 user, haven't seen a KB of swap since I don't do memory intensive stuff, just wanted to future proof.
- Bud 6y agoWe're no longer talking about "directly soldered RAM"; in the M1 Macs, the RAM is now part of the M1 chip itself. It's on the CPU die.
- fredoralive 6y agoNo, the RAM is separate chips / dies, albeit incorporated into the same module as the CPU. On pictures of the M1[1], the RAM is the plastic covered chips next to the main heat spreader for the SoC. [1] Such as the image on the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
- jeffbee 6y agoIt's completely baffling how a little meme like this, which is in no way accurate, survives and thrives not just at large but specifically on HN. Can we track the meme's point of origin?
- mhh__ 6y agoWhat makes you think HN is that different from anywhere else? And besides, memes persist much more readily anywhere where tribalism comes into play e.g. Politics, Apple vs. [Insert your OS here], Any Tesla thread etc.
- wmf 6y agoThe RAM is on-chip but not on-die... but most people (even developers) don't know the difference between a chip, a die, and a core to begin with. It's a pretty minor error, although such errors are a good sign that someone either doesn't know what they're talking about or is careless with terminology.
- dogma1138 6y agoI’m not sure if the RAM can be defined as on chip but it’s on the same package. A chip can contain multiple dies. Usually chips were just discrete packages basically a die that is packaged for integration onto a PCB. A die is just the bare silicon that has an IC etched into it. With interposers and modern multi chip packages things are a bit more complicated. Since the RAM dies are packages they themselves can be defined as chips too while the CPU needs to be integrated to the substrate first. At this point it’s a question is the CPU+RAM combo can be defined as a chip on its own or is it a hybrid/compound package I would go with the latter. If the memory and cpu dies / chips would’ve been stacked like say the raspberry pie one I would call it RAM on chip tho.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoWhy he like that. Maybe it's a good sign someone is half interested and open to learning more.
- totalZero 6y ago
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- Reason077 6y agoNo, the RAM is co-located in the M1's flip-chip package, but it's not physically on the same die. In the photo below, you can see the inside of the BGA flip-chip showing the M1 SoC itself alongside two Hynix LPDDR4 devices: https://www.eetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/Apple-M1-1.jpg https://www.eetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/Apple-M1-1.jpg
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoYou've been down voted for technical inaccuracy. I'll up vote you until someone opens the chip package and replaces or upgrades the ram.
- qbasic_forever 6y agoNow you're just daring someone like Louis Rossmann to give it a go. :)
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoHa! Good one ;) I'd watch that.
- codegeek 6y ago"8GB of ram isn't a lot." You are not wrong in 2021 but this comment took me back to late 1900s-early 2000s when a few hundred MB of RAM was premium :). How far have we come!!
- polka_haunts_us 6y agoI think I forget sometimes because I'm working with this stuff daily now, but yeah the evolution of computing technology is just astounding in scale and pace.
- dj_mc_merlin 6y agoWhy would you need more than 128MB? What are you gonna do with it? Hahahahahahahahahaha....
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago"640kB should be enough for anyone" - nobody ever, but misattributed to Bill Gates. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quote-won-t-go-away----but-did-gates-really-say-it-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/the--640k--quo...
- mc32 6y agoAt the time it would have served pretty much all normal users enough, so I don’t see what’s wrong with the statement. It’s like today telling a home user 32GB should be enough for just about anything a normal user would do with their home PC. I wouldn’t advise anyone to get 128GB (or more) “just in case”. If they have a special need case, then, sure , otherwise no.
- irrational 6y agoI had a 75 MB (yes, MB) drive in the first computer I bought. It was top of the line at the time. I remember telling my wife that I couldn’t imagine ever filling it up. Ha! Now I feel like a pauper if my phone has a 64GB drive ;-)
- 6y ago
- theiz 6y agoRemember that it is RISC too, so memory usage would be much higher then x86.
- lallysingh 6y agoWhy?
- ianferrel 6y agoAt a very basic level: RISC instructions take up more space because they do less individually. That said, very little of most RAM usage is the actual instructions running. It's mostly data.
- mhh__ 6y agoX86 instructions are a bit of a mess, yes, but in ARM you can end up with more of them. The tricky bit here is actually the SIMD instructions since they can be very long and compiler will often go absolutely bonkers on fairly short code.
- moonchild 6y agoArm and x86 have a similar number of instructions. The tradeoff is that with x86 you end up with more compact code because the instructions are variable length; but on arm the actual decoding is easier so you have more space for i$ (or anything else you want).
- mhh__ 6y agoThat's what I meant
- perryizgr8 6y ago> 8GB of ram isn't a lot. True, my 3 year old phone has 8GB ram. On a laptop, 8GB is just anemic.
- deergomoo 6y agoYou're not wrong, but I have to wonder how much phone RAM is just the new megapixels, i.e. bigger number = more impressive spec sheet. iOS is obviously a lot stricter on background activity than Android but manages to work great on 3-6GB. I can comfortably do development work on my laptop with 16GB, and until last year was managing mostly okay on a 5 year-old machine with 8GB. When you factor in the sort of stuff people actually do on a phone, surely 12-16GB is a massive waste? You can make the argument that it will become more useful as the phone ages, but by that point it will have probably stopped receiving software updates.
- Jonnax 6y agoThe value is in having multiple apps stored in memory. I think the average person multitasks more on their phone compared to a PC. Things like having a lot of tabs open. Messaging applications, music streaming etc. It's not required. But instant switching between apps is a nice user experience. In the same way a 120Hz monitor is a nicer experience but 60Hz is perfectly reasonable. I don't think it's fair to compare iOS to Android. Android is quite a bit heaver. I remember reading a quote from someone at Nvidia saying that hardware is much easier to change than software. And at the end of the day, as consumers we should demand more for our money. Phone's aren't getting cheaper.
- stefan_ 6y agoJust yesterday people were telling us that Apple revolutionized memory and are only installing such low amounts of RAM because hey, you got that super fast SSD right there it's basically RAM by a different name. Well, whoops. I guess there are some side effects.
- xxs 6y ago>Apple revolutionized memory Rules of software engineering and engineering in general: you can't break Einstein. RAM is generally slow to begin with, but the disk is slower. RAM should be plenty to be used as disk cache, not vice versa. (edit: omitted the last sentence)
- chungus_khan 6y agoIt's especially funny because the M1 Mac SSDs seem to perform at around the same level as current competition from what I've seen.
- blep-arsh 6y agoI've noticed kernel_task's disk usage is heavily skewed towards writes (e.g. 7GB read for 170GB written over a couple of hours). Assuming it is indeed swapping pages to disk and reads/writes are counted properly, either the dynamic pager or some application/system process are making extremely unfortunate life decisions. Lots of dirty pages are never read back, like there is a huge cache of... something.
- kevincox 6y agoIn general you will write out pages to swap before evicting them from memory. The goal is never having to wait for a page to finish being flushed to disk to allocate a new page. This means you will sometimes access a page that had been written out to disk but is still available to memory. If you modify it it may be written out again before being read. So it isn't unreasonable to have swap writes be higher than swap reads. However those numbers seem extreme probably some bad tuning or just neglecting to account for the full cost of writing to disk.
- xxs 6y agoOne thing: any machine client&server I've used in the past 20 years, the swap is the 1st thing to disable. If there is a need for swap, install more RAM. > Terrabytes of usage must be a bug. Garbage collection setups with relatively large heaps are extra horrid when it comes to memory pattern usage while running full GC... and respectively swap.
- Jonnax 6y agoThe most ram you can get on the machines is 16gb.
- xxs 6y agoOf course, that's the point. If you cannot have enough memory, you don't buy them. Even the old haswell (2013) Acer laptop has 16GB; the skylake lenovo laptop I use for work has 32GB.
- the8472 6y agoSwap has value. E.g. it lets you have a tmpfs that's larger than your physical RAM. Or you can process memory dumps of a machine larger than yours. Or you can just freeze a process group and have it dumped to disk so other processes can use the RAM in the meantime. It can definitely help avoiding the OOM killer. Swap occupancy and swap activity are not the same. The former is fine, the latter should be kept small.
- xxs 6y ago> Or you can process memory dumps of a machine larger than yours. You should be able to that in software anyways - instead of loading to memory entirely, all it has to do is memory map the file dump. About the need to freeze a process (group). I don't quite see how that's useful on a server. On a desktop machine I have never run into such a case where closing the application would not suffice. Is there an example? Last - using the swap pretty much means no disk cache.
- the8472 6y ago
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago> 8GB of ram isn't a lot. Actually yes it is.