13 ms·

Oh wow I’m pretty sure I’ve been debugging this issue all week and was on the verge of reformatting my Mac back to Catalina (as I don’t recall seeing this there

Oh wow I’m pretty sure I’ve been debugging this issue all week and was on the verge of reformatting my Mac back to Catalina (as I don’t recall seeing this there). What great timing! I noticed the issue as my laptop feeling laggy overall, but especially that graphics on the laptop screen (eg the minimise animation) ran at like 5fps when my external monitor was connected - they were fine without, and the external monitor was ok. A friend said theirs was fine with the same setup but a 4K monitor so I did wonder if it was something to do with scaling but wasn’t aware you could do anything about it. Will test this out tomorrow! Slightly off topic but related - had a fun day yesterday tracking down the fact that in Big Sur, timers in tasks that are not in the foreground (ie the active window) start firing up to 10 secs late. I thought it must be a symptom of whatever issue was making my computer laggy but it actually seems to be aggressive power saving... so if anyone knows how to opt out of that I’ll be happy, really messes up what I was doing yesterday (basically a program that forwards IPC messages between two programs - they start arriving late after 10 secs or so).

vaughan 5y ago
> my laptop feeling laggy overall Run `sudo watch -d -t -n1 thermal levels`. When levels are above 100, your laptop will throttle. Once they return to 100, throttling will cease. There is a back-off algorithm at play too, so its not good enough that your CPU returns to normal temperature, it must stay at normal temperature for a period of time before things stop lagging. Also, disable turbo boost.
- tomduncalf 5y ago
  Thank you! Will try this out. Shame to have these issues on a £3k laptop but what can ya do lol. Waiting on the M1 Pro then I’ll swap it out!
- allarm 5y ago
  > Also, disable turbo boost. Is there a way to disable it without installing some 3rd party software?
tomduncalf 5y ago
In case this helps anyone, I spent this morning debugging my issue further and I am pretty certain it's a hardware fault either with, or affecting, the dGPU in my laptop. If I force internal GPU with `sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 0`, animations and graphics benchmarks are much faster than with dGPU enabled! For example, I tried the Unigine Heaven benchmark and I get 14fps with internal GPU, 4fps with discrete (5300M) GPU, which I am pretty sure is not right lol. (If you run this command, `sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 2` set it back to auto). Did a clean install of Catalina to rule out OS issues, and got friends with the same laptop to test out the same website I was seeing extreme slowness on (it was fine for them). The laptop recently had a repair and pretty much every part was replaced as a result of liquid damage, so I suspect either a faulty part or incorrect installation. Off to the Apple Store I go!

vaughan 5y ago

> my laptop feeling laggy overall Run `sudo watch -d -t -n1 thermal levels`. When levels are above 100, your laptop will throttle. Once they return to 100, throttling will cease. There is a back-off algorithm at play too, so its not good enough that your CPU returns to normal temperature, it must stay at normal temperature for a period of time before things stop lagging. Also, disable turbo boost.

tomduncalf 5y ago
Thank you! Will try this out. Shame to have these issues on a £3k laptop but what can ya do lol. Waiting on the M1 Pro then I’ll swap it out!
allarm 5y ago
> Also, disable turbo boost. Is there a way to disable it without installing some 3rd party software?

tomduncalf 5y ago

In case this helps anyone, I spent this morning debugging my issue further and I am pretty certain it's a hardware fault either with, or affecting, the dGPU in my laptop. If I force internal GPU with `sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 0`, animations and graphics benchmarks are much faster than with dGPU enabled! For example, I tried the Unigine Heaven benchmark and I get 14fps with internal GPU, 4fps with discrete (5300M) GPU, which I am pretty sure is not right lol. (If you run this command, `sudo pmset -b gpuswitch 2` set it back to auto). Did a clean install of Catalina to rule out OS issues, and got friends with the same laptop to test out the same website I was seeing extreme slowness on (it was fine for them). The laptop recently had a repair and pretty much every part was replaced as a result of liquid damage, so I suspect either a faulty part or incorrect installation. Off to the Apple Store I go!