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My M1 Air is fantastic with thus far only one exception - recent frequent OS out of memory notices, but no apparent single cause. I imagine it's a software pro

by blunte 5y ago

My M1 Air is fantastic with thus far only one exception - recent frequent OS out of memory notices, but no apparent single cause. I imagine it's a software problem that will be soon resolved (and it's the first such memory problem I've ever encountered on any Mac in 10+ years). With 16GB, I normally have open: RubyMine, DataGrip (two heavy JetBrains products), a terminal with two tabs, one having tmux and multiple local subshells and one with a remote connection to a server which has tmux (love tmux!), PostgreSQL, MailCatcher, any number of custom app servers (some ruby, some Node), Firefox with far too many open tabs, Spotify, and a handful of other apps. I'm just about to find out how this thing handles 4k video processing as I got some new video toys to travel with. Maybe I'll end up needing the extra cores of an M1 Pro Max, but hopefully not.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
> My M1 Air is fantastic with thus far only one exception - recent frequent OS out of memory notices, but no apparent single cause. Mmm. That's disconcerting, as I just bought my fiancee an M1 Air with 8gb. (Getting her to spend more than strictly necessary on a laptop would be worse than pulling teeth.) Hopefully that's not an issue with her computing needs, which should be fairly minimal ... Word, Excel, BlueJeans for teleconferencing, Chrome.
- blunte 5y ago
  Something changed which brought these errors on... I suspect it was an OS update. My usage habits did not change, and for the first few months I had none of these errors.
  - d1sxeyes 5y ago
    Do you use a Photos album as screensaver or desktop background?
    - blunte 5y ago
      Nope, blank screen screensaver for me. FWIW, it hasn't happened to me in days now. Normally I never reboot, and I usually have a lot of services and dev stuff running in the background that I forget about. Since my last reboot, days ago, I haven't had the problem. Maybe it's because I also haven't been working :D, so the background pressure is low.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  For the record, 8GB was unusable for me as someone who habitually leaves tabs open. I use IDEs that are heavier duty than the average user, but those didn't even seem to be the issue, once I had more than about a couple dozen or so tabs open the machine would start grinding to a halt. Sometimes so badly that even closing applications was difficult. I upgraded to a 16GB and have zero issues now. It seems browser tabs just don't play to the strengths of the M1's memory setup
015a 5y ago
I've been getting these a ton recently, on both a 2018 15" Intel MBP w/ 32g memory and an M1 Air w/ 16g. I suspect its just a recent MacOS bug that will get sorted out, and not an actual OOM issue. Chrome can use a lot, but I've never gotten close to using 16 gigs in my workflows, let alone 32.
d1sxeyes 5y ago
I also started getting these recently on two different Macbooks, and I think they were being caused by the screensaver loading a large number of photos up front rather than just when they're needed. I had configured the 'sliding panels' or whatever it's called to use a whole album of about 1000 photos, and noticed that I was getting these weird OOM notices, and when I checked in activity monitor, there didn't seem to be any memory overuse. But I realised it was happening when I was waking my computer from sleep. I reduced it to 100 photos and now I don't see the warnings any more, so my guess is that the screensaver was trying to read all 1000 or so photos into memory at once, which was causing the issues. If you have a photo screensaver, worth checking (possibly also the desktop background).

by blunte 5y ago

mrtranscendence 5y ago

> My M1 Air is fantastic with thus far only one exception - recent frequent OS out of memory notices, but no apparent single cause. Mmm. That's disconcerting, as I just bought my fiancee an M1 Air with 8gb. (Getting her to spend more than strictly necessary on a laptop would be worse than pulling teeth.) Hopefully that's not an issue with her computing needs, which should be fairly minimal ... Word, Excel, BlueJeans for teleconferencing, Chrome.

blunte 5y ago
Something changed which brought these errors on... I suspect it was an OS update. My usage habits did not change, and for the first few months I had none of these errors.
- d1sxeyes 5y ago
  Do you use a Photos album as screensaver or desktop background?
  - blunte 5y ago
    Nope, blank screen screensaver for me. FWIW, it hasn't happened to me in days now. Normally I never reboot, and I usually have a lot of services and dev stuff running in the background that I forget about. Since my last reboot, days ago, I haven't had the problem. Maybe it's because I also haven't been working :D, so the background pressure is low.
BoorishBears 5y ago
For the record, 8GB was unusable for me as someone who habitually leaves tabs open. I use IDEs that are heavier duty than the average user, but those didn't even seem to be the issue, once I had more than about a couple dozen or so tabs open the machine would start grinding to a halt. Sometimes so badly that even closing applications was difficult. I upgraded to a 16GB and have zero issues now. It seems browser tabs just don't play to the strengths of the M1's memory setup

015a 5y ago

I've been getting these a ton recently, on both a 2018 15" Intel MBP w/ 32g memory and an M1 Air w/ 16g. I suspect its just a recent MacOS bug that will get sorted out, and not an actual OOM issue. Chrome can use a lot, but I've never gotten close to using 16 gigs in my workflows, let alone 32.

d1sxeyes 5y ago

I also started getting these recently on two different Macbooks, and I think they were being caused by the screensaver loading a large number of photos up front rather than just when they're needed. I had configured the 'sliding panels' or whatever it's called to use a whole album of about 1000 photos, and noticed that I was getting these weird OOM notices, and when I checked in activity monitor, there didn't seem to be any memory overuse. But I realised it was happening when I was waking my computer from sleep. I reduced it to 100 photos and now I don't see the warnings any more, so my guess is that the screensaver was trying to read all 1000 or so photos into memory at once, which was causing the issues. If you have a photo screensaver, worth checking (possibly also the desktop background).