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Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs.

Wondering if it's just me: I bought an M1 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, based on reports saying that RAM management is much more effective than with Intel CPUs. Ever since, I'm really struggling with load management. I typically have Chrome open with 20-30 tabs, plus a couple of Electron apps (Notion, Slack, Google Calendar), and my MacBook frequently slows down to a crawl or gets stuck entirely. Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute. Is anyone else experiencing the same?

LASR 5y ago
Yes. The M1 is not magic. Or at least it has limits.
dstick 5y ago
> plus a couple of Electron apps I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(
- hirako2000 5y ago
  I confirm. Embedded nodes each take a few hundreds of megabyte. It looked cool when we had 2 electron apps out there, now with so many of them good by ram.not mentioning apps developed in a few months rather than years, packed with features to become more memory hungry than the OS. MS Team is a particular offender.
  - lukevp 5y ago
    Evergreen webviews baked into the OS are the next frontier of desktop app development. They can share a renderer and have much lower memory usage per app as a result - see the changes in Windows 11. Couple that with a lighter weight desktop compatibility shim to break out of the sandbox conditionally (like Tauri does in Rust) and this architecture can be totally fine. The issue isn’t the concept of using web technologies, it’s just the current implementation that was needed to make everything work on our existing platforms. Mac will be a holdout because they heart native but hopefully will concede at some point because more and more people are going to deploy apps this way from here on out. It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.
    - hollerith 5y ago
      >It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies. Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux (and 80% of respondents to a recent Emacs survey prefer to use one of those GUIs rather than Emacs's TTY interface), so "largest of the large companies" is going a little too far.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux That doesn't mean it would be commercially worthwhile to employ them to do so; volunteers do lots of things that wouldn't worthwhile to employ people to do. OTOH, wanting volunteers doesn't make it happen.
    - Klonoar 5y ago
      This will never be the same as Electron due to differences in the various rendering engines (e.g, Webkit2/WKWebView/WebView2 all have subtle differences), and this isn't accounting for version differences. The reason people ship Electron is because Electron is literally the same thing wherever you shove it. You can search on this very forum for comments from the dev who migrated Slack from per-platform-WebViews to Electron.
      - lukevp 5y ago
        That’s what I meant by evergreen webviews. I think you missed the point of what I was saying. There are not evergreen webviews cureently. They currently only update webviews on major OS releases. with windows 11 they will ship an evergreen webview for use by Teams and will abandon trident as well. it’s currently a react/electron app that will run in the OS webview on Windows instead of in Electron. This is precisely the reason MS is doing this. Slack was os-specific before evergreen webviews were a thing.
        Klonoar 5y ago
        >I think you missed the point of what I was saying. I don't believe I have, and I believe you're missing the point - much like everyone who says that platform-specific WebViews are the solution to Electron. Go actually read the comments from the devs who migrated away from WKWebView. What you are describing will not solve what they sought to get away from.
  - mgerullis 5y ago
    Teams is a horrible abomination on so many levels. fragmented apps, auth, performance, it’s all a mess. Recently they took away the ability to do :emojis: I believe it just exists to make people suffer
qeternity 5y ago
Anecdotally, the M1 feels very performant with 8gb (I have MBP and Mini 8gb variants) compared to my 16gb Intel MBP and my 32gb Hackintosh. That said - it’s not magic. 30 tabs in Chrome is a lot if you’re not using a tab suspender extension. But one thing I do notice is that when a Rosetta 2 app is running, the entire machine seems to take a hit. I would check the architecture of your apps and see if you have any x86 apps running.
- __float 5y ago
  Seconded. I have 30+ tabs open (though in Firefox), alongside VS Code, Obsidian (a notes app, but with web views), Spotify (web views), and I don't frequently run into serious performance issues. I do try to avoid Rosetta quite a bit though (right now I have no Intel processes in Activity Monitor). Also check Messages.app hasn't run away with the CPU. Sometimes it seems to do that :(
- matznerd 5y ago
  Lol 30 tabs is a lot? I'm running 32 gb ram on windows i7-6700 3.4 ghz on mini ATX and currently have 883 tabs open, using marvelous suspender and few other tweaks, but still have 95 windows opens (1 tab typically alive in each window minimum excluding my suspension blacklist...). Also have photoshop, notion, and a few other apps going and am running smoothly at 40-70% cpu utilization and 85% memory...
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    I think the "if you're not using a tab background suspender" part was important there. Not sure if Chrome is still this way, but it would allow background tabs to still run things like JS even after hours of not being focused.
  - Sebguer 5y ago
    why
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > using marvelous suspender Did you even read my comment?
owenversteeg 5y ago
Hmm. I’ve never ran into that myself and I’ve used a lot of swap on my 8gb M1 Air, so you may be running into another issue, but one thing I have noticed is that performance is far better with native Apple apps. I switched to using Slack in the browser and Safari as my main browser and battery life and performance have been amazing.
Shorel 5y ago
Want to use "apps" that run in a browser. Then just open them in a browser. That's what I do with Teams, Discord and so on. Much better than opening many isolated browser runtimes for what's essentially badly optimized webpages.
- wffurr 5y ago
  And if you want the separate window so you can pretend they’re apps, use the “create shortcut” option in the menu.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Electron has higher permissions so you can do things like select your audio inputs in discord which is nicer than the browser selection.
  - ra423 5y ago
    Are they any better than the PWAs?
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      They have far more extensive permissions like direct filesystem access. It can make some interactions much more fluid or even just possible at all. You couldn't run VS code very well in a browser for example.
  - f1refly 5y ago
    Alternatively you can always use a voip client which doesnt need half your systems resources. Picking audio channels was a normal feature decades ago.
    - SilverRed 5y ago
      >Alternatively you can always use No I can't. The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else. And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams. MacOS drawing a line in the RAM sand at 16GB with most on 8GB will likely encourage programs to be more efficient rather than be a burden to the user. As we have seen with mobile platforms, programs will use as much resources as they are allowed to. Adding more resources does not fix the problem unless the programs are already quite efficient.
klohto 5y ago
Well it definitely is more efficient but RAM is still RAM… Swapping whole 8 gigs will make your system sluggish no matter what. I feel like 8GB is fine if your usage is really light, but swapping more than 70% will slow it down extensively. On the other hand there is a whole camp of people who run heavy dev suites on 8GB and don’t have these issues, so it might really be a faulty line. It’s the first version in the end.
varispeed 5y ago
Are you using an AdBlock? If not, maybe that's why Chrome is struggling. All these adverts eat resources like crazy.
ryanSrich 5y ago
Can anyone explain to me the psychology of having 30 tabs open? Why not just bookmark the URLs to an ephemeral folder or something? Having more than 10 tabs open is beyond stressful for me, and honestly I can’t see how having more open would make anyone more productive. Really curious to learn about other workflows and excessive tab use is one I’m morbidly curious about.
- Tsiklon 5y ago
  Personally on my phone and work computer I keep legion number of tabs open. On my phone, it’s because using bookmarks is slower than opening the tab menu. Plus the OS will swap out tabs that haven’t been used in a while With a work perspective in mind I have one window set up per task, I use tree style tabs on Firefox, and at a glance I can see the complete context of a task I’m researching, just from the decision tree the tab branches show. Every potentially interesting link that’ll help me with my task gets opened on a branch below the parent, then reviewed and filtered. This is tremendously useful when it comes to writing up documentation or updating tickets and the like.
- barrkel 5y ago
  Bookmarks are like a bin things get thrown into and completely forgotten about. I open a bookmark maybe once a week, and then it's usually for something like accessing the wifi router, or a bookmarklet for adapting a web site. Tabs are like a TODO list. If something needs to have attention paid to it, and then dismissed, I open a tab for it. (Of course, I use Firefox & Tree Style Tabs. I find Chrome almost unusable due to its tabbing idiom.)
  - ryanSrich 5y ago
    Interesting. I’d never be able to use Tabs as todos because I personally use tabs very ephemerally. Closing out of chrome with 3 profiles and 10 tabs each open is nothing to me because I don’t care what tabs are open. If they’re important links then I’ve already written them down in Roam and/or bookmarked them. question - how do you find anything? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never used tree tabs, but finding the link you used last week or last month to complete a task sounds like a nightmare without bookmarking it. Contrast this with my workflow, which doesn’t rely on tabs, and I can easily find it in my notes in less than 10 seconds.
kccoder 5y ago
The 8GB M1 I bought was constantly fighting the limited RAM, so I exchanged it for a 16GB model, which has been perfect. For those looking, the MicroCenter near me has 16GB MacBook Air models available at a discount, other MicroCenter locations might have the same.
megablast 5y ago
Nope. Got the 8gb too. I have xcode, firefox, safari, mail and a lot more. No issues, apart from xcode because it sucks, and has sucked for years. Chrome is your problem.
miguelrochefort 5y ago
Same here (although it’s more like 200 open tabs across 10 virtual desktops). It still feels slower than my cheap Atom netbook, but the battery life and hardware quality more than makes up for it. This might be an opportunity to tweak my browsing habits.
- cunthorpe 5y ago
  How do you even split windows/tabs across that many desktops? I mean “logically”. Are you working on 10 different things in any given day/week?
  - miguelrochefort 5y ago
    A laptop display is too small to see more than a single window. I always make my windows full screen. For example right now I have the following windows/desktops: 0. Google Calendar + Gmail 1. Facebook Messenger 2. YouTube (music/podcast) 3. Terminal 4. Visual Studio Code 5. Documentation (5-10 tabs) 6. Google Colab 7. Google Cloud Console 8. Google Sheets + Docs 7. Wikipedia (20+ tabs) 8. Google Search (30+ tabs) 9. Hacker News (20+ tabs)
smoldesu 5y ago
Memory management certainly feels pretty sluggish on my similarly configured Air. I'm holding out hope for a 64-gig model if Apple really wants to challenge my desktop.
Saris 5y ago
I don't have an M1, but on my computers I find Chrome to be memory heavy and rather slow. It's worth trying out Firefox and seeing if that works better for you.
prawn 5y ago
I have an 8GB M1 MBP. Photoshop, Lightroom, Resolve, Sublime, Chrome (50+ tabs), Transmit, etc and it's almost always very fast. Only slows down if importing to Lightroom and generating previews, or rendering video from Resolve.
system2 5y ago
I feel like I am the only one who doesn't hoard browser tabs like everyone I read here. Why 20-30? Why not close the unnecessary stuff or bookmark if that's important?
Reason077 5y ago
> "Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute." Open Activity Monitor and keep an eye on the memory pressure graph, as well as checking for individual apps that are running away with huge amounts of memory. Also, make sure your SSD isn't too full, as pressure on the NVM will reduce swap performance! M1 Macs certainly seem to "do more with less" than Intel Macs, but as another poster said, they're not magic. Paging in and out vast amounts of swap will still eventually cause performance issues.

LASR 5y ago

Yes. The M1 is not magic. Or at least it has limits.

dstick 5y ago

> plus a couple of Electron apps I’m afraid that might be your problem right there :(

hirako2000 5y ago
I confirm. Embedded nodes each take a few hundreds of megabyte. It looked cool when we had 2 electron apps out there, now with so many of them good by ram.not mentioning apps developed in a few months rather than years, packed with features to become more memory hungry than the OS. MS Team is a particular offender.
- lukevp 5y ago
  Evergreen webviews baked into the OS are the next frontier of desktop app development. They can share a renderer and have much lower memory usage per app as a result - see the changes in Windows 11. Couple that with a lighter weight desktop compatibility shim to break out of the sandbox conditionally (like Tauri does in Rust) and this architecture can be totally fine. The issue isn’t the concept of using web technologies, it’s just the current implementation that was needed to make everything work on our existing platforms. Mac will be a holdout because they heart native but hopefully will concede at some point because more and more people are going to deploy apps this way from here on out. It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies.
  - hollerith 5y ago
    >It’s not worth it to employ native app developers for each platform except for the largest of the large companies. Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux (and 80% of respondents to a recent Emacs survey prefer to use one of those GUIs rather than Emacs's TTY interface), so "largest of the large companies" is going a little too far.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Programmers have ported Emacs to the native GUIs for MacOS, Windows and Linux That doesn't mean it would be commercially worthwhile to employ them to do so; volunteers do lots of things that wouldn't worthwhile to employ people to do. OTOH, wanting volunteers doesn't make it happen.
  - Klonoar 5y ago
    This will never be the same as Electron due to differences in the various rendering engines (e.g, Webkit2/WKWebView/WebView2 all have subtle differences), and this isn't accounting for version differences. The reason people ship Electron is because Electron is literally the same thing wherever you shove it. You can search on this very forum for comments from the dev who migrated Slack from per-platform-WebViews to Electron.
    - lukevp 5y ago
      That’s what I meant by evergreen webviews. I think you missed the point of what I was saying. There are not evergreen webviews cureently. They currently only update webviews on major OS releases. with windows 11 they will ship an evergreen webview for use by Teams and will abandon trident as well. it’s currently a react/electron app that will run in the OS webview on Windows instead of in Electron. This is precisely the reason MS is doing this. Slack was os-specific before evergreen webviews were a thing.
      - Klonoar 5y ago
        >I think you missed the point of what I was saying. I don't believe I have, and I believe you're missing the point - much like everyone who says that platform-specific WebViews are the solution to Electron. Go actually read the comments from the devs who migrated away from WKWebView. What you are describing will not solve what they sought to get away from.
- mgerullis 5y ago
  Teams is a horrible abomination on so many levels. fragmented apps, auth, performance, it’s all a mess. Recently they took away the ability to do :emojis: I believe it just exists to make people suffer

qeternity 5y ago

Anecdotally, the M1 feels very performant with 8gb (I have MBP and Mini 8gb variants) compared to my 16gb Intel MBP and my 32gb Hackintosh. That said - it’s not magic. 30 tabs in Chrome is a lot if you’re not using a tab suspender extension. But one thing I do notice is that when a Rosetta 2 app is running, the entire machine seems to take a hit. I would check the architecture of your apps and see if you have any x86 apps running.

__float 5y ago
Seconded. I have 30+ tabs open (though in Firefox), alongside VS Code, Obsidian (a notes app, but with web views), Spotify (web views), and I don't frequently run into serious performance issues. I do try to avoid Rosetta quite a bit though (right now I have no Intel processes in Activity Monitor). Also check Messages.app hasn't run away with the CPU. Sometimes it seems to do that :(
matznerd 5y ago
Lol 30 tabs is a lot? I'm running 32 gb ram on windows i7-6700 3.4 ghz on mini ATX and currently have 883 tabs open, using marvelous suspender and few other tweaks, but still have 95 windows opens (1 tab typically alive in each window minimum excluding my suspension blacklist...). Also have photoshop, notion, and a few other apps going and am running smoothly at 40-70% cpu utilization and 85% memory...
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  I think the "if you're not using a tab background suspender" part was important there. Not sure if Chrome is still this way, but it would allow background tabs to still run things like JS even after hours of not being focused.
- Sebguer 5y ago
  why
- qeternity 5y ago
  > using marvelous suspender Did you even read my comment?

owenversteeg 5y ago

Hmm. I’ve never ran into that myself and I’ve used a lot of swap on my 8gb M1 Air, so you may be running into another issue, but one thing I have noticed is that performance is far better with native Apple apps. I switched to using Slack in the browser and Safari as my main browser and battery life and performance have been amazing.

Shorel 5y ago

Want to use "apps" that run in a browser. Then just open them in a browser. That's what I do with Teams, Discord and so on. Much better than opening many isolated browser runtimes for what's essentially badly optimized webpages.

wffurr 5y ago
And if you want the separate window so you can pretend they’re apps, use the “create shortcut” option in the menu.
SilverRed 5y ago
Electron has higher permissions so you can do things like select your audio inputs in discord which is nicer than the browser selection.
- ra423 5y ago
  Are they any better than the PWAs?
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    They have far more extensive permissions like direct filesystem access. It can make some interactions much more fluid or even just possible at all. You couldn't run VS code very well in a browser for example.
- f1refly 5y ago
  Alternatively you can always use a voip client which doesnt need half your systems resources. Picking audio channels was a normal feature decades ago.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    >Alternatively you can always use No I can't. The IM platform is decided for me already so I can not pick something else. And the company will pick the platform with the most features / integrations which is currently Teams. MacOS drawing a line in the RAM sand at 16GB with most on 8GB will likely encourage programs to be more efficient rather than be a burden to the user. As we have seen with mobile platforms, programs will use as much resources as they are allowed to. Adding more resources does not fix the problem unless the programs are already quite efficient.

klohto 5y ago

Well it definitely is more efficient but RAM is still RAM… Swapping whole 8 gigs will make your system sluggish no matter what. I feel like 8GB is fine if your usage is really light, but swapping more than 70% will slow it down extensively. On the other hand there is a whole camp of people who run heavy dev suites on 8GB and don’t have these issues, so it might really be a faulty line. It’s the first version in the end.

varispeed 5y ago

Are you using an AdBlock? If not, maybe that's why Chrome is struggling. All these adverts eat resources like crazy.

ryanSrich 5y ago

Can anyone explain to me the psychology of having 30 tabs open? Why not just bookmark the URLs to an ephemeral folder or something? Having more than 10 tabs open is beyond stressful for me, and honestly I can’t see how having more open would make anyone more productive. Really curious to learn about other workflows and excessive tab use is one I’m morbidly curious about.

Tsiklon 5y ago
Personally on my phone and work computer I keep legion number of tabs open. On my phone, it’s because using bookmarks is slower than opening the tab menu. Plus the OS will swap out tabs that haven’t been used in a while With a work perspective in mind I have one window set up per task, I use tree style tabs on Firefox, and at a glance I can see the complete context of a task I’m researching, just from the decision tree the tab branches show. Every potentially interesting link that’ll help me with my task gets opened on a branch below the parent, then reviewed and filtered. This is tremendously useful when it comes to writing up documentation or updating tickets and the like.
barrkel 5y ago
Bookmarks are like a bin things get thrown into and completely forgotten about. I open a bookmark maybe once a week, and then it's usually for something like accessing the wifi router, or a bookmarklet for adapting a web site. Tabs are like a TODO list. If something needs to have attention paid to it, and then dismissed, I open a tab for it. (Of course, I use Firefox & Tree Style Tabs. I find Chrome almost unusable due to its tabbing idiom.)
- ryanSrich 5y ago
  Interesting. I’d never be able to use Tabs as todos because I personally use tabs very ephemerally. Closing out of chrome with 3 profiles and 10 tabs each open is nothing to me because I don’t care what tabs are open. If they’re important links then I’ve already written them down in Roam and/or bookmarked them. question - how do you find anything? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never used tree tabs, but finding the link you used last week or last month to complete a task sounds like a nightmare without bookmarking it. Contrast this with my workflow, which doesn’t rely on tabs, and I can easily find it in my notes in less than 10 seconds.

kccoder 5y ago

The 8GB M1 I bought was constantly fighting the limited RAM, so I exchanged it for a 16GB model, which has been perfect. For those looking, the MicroCenter near me has 16GB MacBook Air models available at a discount, other MicroCenter locations might have the same.

megablast 5y ago

Nope. Got the 8gb too. I have xcode, firefox, safari, mail and a lot more. No issues, apart from xcode because it sucks, and has sucked for years. Chrome is your problem.

miguelrochefort 5y ago

Same here (although it’s more like 200 open tabs across 10 virtual desktops). It still feels slower than my cheap Atom netbook, but the battery life and hardware quality more than makes up for it. This might be an opportunity to tweak my browsing habits.

cunthorpe 5y ago
How do you even split windows/tabs across that many desktops? I mean “logically”. Are you working on 10 different things in any given day/week?
- miguelrochefort 5y ago
  A laptop display is too small to see more than a single window. I always make my windows full screen. For example right now I have the following windows/desktops: 0. Google Calendar + Gmail 1. Facebook Messenger 2. YouTube (music/podcast) 3. Terminal 4. Visual Studio Code 5. Documentation (5-10 tabs) 6. Google Colab 7. Google Cloud Console 8. Google Sheets + Docs 7. Wikipedia (20+ tabs) 8. Google Search (30+ tabs) 9. Hacker News (20+ tabs)

smoldesu 5y ago

Memory management certainly feels pretty sluggish on my similarly configured Air. I'm holding out hope for a 64-gig model if Apple really wants to challenge my desktop.

Saris 5y ago

I don't have an M1, but on my computers I find Chrome to be memory heavy and rather slow. It's worth trying out Firefox and seeing if that works better for you.

prawn 5y ago

I have an 8GB M1 MBP. Photoshop, Lightroom, Resolve, Sublime, Chrome (50+ tabs), Transmit, etc and it's almost always very fast. Only slows down if importing to Lightroom and generating previews, or rendering video from Resolve.

system2 5y ago

I feel like I am the only one who doesn't hoard browser tabs like everyone I read here. Why 20-30? Why not close the unnecessary stuff or bookmark if that's important?

Reason077 5y ago

> "Simple commands - "close all tabs" in Chrome - can take 50 seconds to execute." Open Activity Monitor and keep an eye on the memory pressure graph, as well as checking for individual apps that are running away with huge amounts of memory. Also, make sure your SSD isn't too full, as pressure on the NVM will reduce swap performance! M1 Macs certainly seem to "do more with less" than Intel Macs, but as another poster said, they're not magic. Paging in and out vast amounts of swap will still eventually cause performance issues.