41 ms·

Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro

• thesquib 5y ago
  I already have these issues on my 2019 MacBook Pro. Presumably it's the OS rather than the hardware but who knows
• herpderperator 5y ago
  I did notice that CalendarAgent uses around 350MB which is ridiculous to just sync my Google Calendar. When you kill it, it restarts itself goes down to 15MB but gradually goes up. Doesn't seem to go above 400MBish, but still... Other than that, no complaints. Other apps seem to manage memory rather well. Rather than working with Activity Monitor open 24/7, just install iStat Menus. Makes it really easy to monitor your system.
• mlindner 5y ago
  I use Firefox on M1 Air with only 16GB of memory and have had zero memory issues. I have like 100 tabs open and no problems. Machine and OS works perfectly and is rock solid. No issues at all.
• 0x0 5y ago
  Sounds very similar to the macOS 10.15.6 release, which had a horrible kernel memory leak. It was especially visible when running virtual machines. After a few hours the kernel memory pressure was so high that it would oom kill every usermode process one by one, including critical system processes. That one had me yearning for a linux grub menu entry for "previous kernel".
  • herpderperator 5y ago
    Is kernel memory pressure different to the normal memory pressure? Or is it the same thing?
    • tticvs 5y ago
      It's fundamentally the same thing, but when the kernel is refuses to deallocate memory you can't just terminate the process, you have to reboot the system.
    • 0x0 5y ago
      The kernel memory usage would only show up with ever-increasing numbers in "sudo zprint", it wasn't visible in activity monitor
• fortran77 5y ago
  What a trainwreck! I'm so glad I switched to Windows 10, and now Windows 11. It's hard to "invent your own" CPU, and think that you know better than experts who have been doing it for decades.
  • adolph 5y ago
    The wreck comes to all trains eventually. It’s only a question of how well any vendor’s interest being aligned with customer’s that they are avoided and remedied.
  • LeoPanthera 5y ago
    Non-sequitur. This doesn't affect older Apple hardware running the new OS, but you're comparing hardware with software. Also, the majority of your comment history is bashing Apple and promoting Windows. Do you work there? Are you paid to do this?
    • fortran77 5y ago
      > the majority of your comment history That's an absolute, and easily refuted, lie. @dang -- ban this user.
    • dang 5y ago
      Attacking another user like this is explicitly against the site guidelines and will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. Note this rule—it's there for good reason: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
  • rootlocus 5y ago
    The CPU is a groundbreaking piece of technology. The OS / runtime can be patched. It's not like Intel or Microsoft release flawless hardware and software. And obviously, competition is at the heart of capitalism.
• mstange 5y ago
  For people who are experiencing a leak on macOS 12: Check if you have set a custom cursor color in the system accessibility preferences. Resetting the cursor color to the default may fix it. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735345#c18 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735345#c18 (edit: rephrased to mention macOS 12)
  • 2bitencryption 5y ago
    Good lord would I love to see the postmortem breakdown on that one
    • valleyer 5y ago
      Having worked at Apple adjacent to the likely responsible teams, the relevant details are: overworked engineering teams, insufficient QA investment, and most of all a yearly macOS major release schedule that persists primarily to benefit the egos of Apple's upper management. Until you see a WWDC that doesn't announce a major release of macOS, expect more of the same. To any involved Apple folks here, I feel your pain, and I'm sorry.
      • novok 5y ago
        What I don't get about apple, with a compensation policy that is less than the other big techs, because they can't get over the late 90s, team sizes that are usually smaller and being one of the largest market cap companies in the world, why don't they hire more?
        • bogwog 5y ago
          Hiring more people isn't going to make them more money. Improving their products/services isn't going to make them more money. Providing more value to customers isn't going to make them more money. Charging $300 for a screen replacement will make them more money. Selling bluetooth headphones with non-replaceable batteries will make them more money. Collecting taxes on developers will make them more money. etc etc
• Ancalagon 5y ago
  Looks like all those Big-O-focused sdev interviews really paid off!
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 5y ago
    O(64 x 2^30) = O(1), so it's still constant memory usage.
• throwaway-jim 5y ago
  I'm facing the similar issues with my m1 air(8 GB). Recently firefox managed to get to 44GB. I'm closing and re-opening my applications; and checking the memory pressure when things start to feel sluggish. Also unrelated but my speakers have started to sound like garbage.
  • threeseed 5y ago
    a) You need to raise an issue then with Firefox team as that isn't something that Apple is at fault for. b) If your speakers sound bad then it could be dust or debris. Might want to unscrew your Mac and use a blower / vaccum cleaner on it.
• pdx6 5y ago
  My M1 Mini crashes about once a week. I look through the crash log before sending it off to Apple, but is always seems to be something different that takes down the system. In comparison, my 2018 Macbook Pro rarely crashes and is running the same version of the OS. I have the M1 Pro Max on my to-buy list, but I'm going to wait a bit to make the purchase since I really can't have my $4000 workstation crashing on me.
  • prawn 5y ago
    Two or three times, my M1 MBP has crashed overnight, but with the same error - something involving external drives. I keep 6-7 external drives connected at all times via two chained hubs. Hard to know if it's the OS or a flakey drive. Beside that, it's been fine though.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    I'm kind of flipped around. My 16 inch 2019 MBP panics every two or three days. My 13 inch M1 MBP is rock solid and memory pressure is fine. Both running Big Sur. I won't call the M1 machine my favorite Mac of all time (my old 2013 takes that prize) but it's solidly in 2nd place right now. It's given me so little trouble...
  • mthoms 5y ago
    My M1 Mini crashes (while sleeping) about once a week here as well. Funny thing is that I never get the crash reporter showing up after a hard reset. Very strange.
• johndill 5y ago
  One wonders if there is some weird software his employer installed? Probably not. Apple just dropped a new chip into a laptop designed for another chip and its not a good match. Mac controls the entire production process including software. That laptop was designed for a different chip. Everything else with the M1 is fine because the hardware was designed for the chip
• alphabettsy 5y ago
  This is caused by macOS 12 Monterey. Having the same problem, but seeing reports from Intel Mac’s as well.
  • Matthias1 5y ago
    From the article: > That’s extremely similar to the MacBook Pro and Monterey issues I’ve read this week—except I’m still running Big Sur.
    • alphabettsy 5y ago
      I missed that. Maybe there is more than one issue here, but Intel users having the same issue on Monterey where they did not have it before seems telling. Maybe M1 machines had a different OS build or features that caused this issue in Big Sur and now it's universal in Monterey?
• itsjustmath 5y ago
  Might be totally off base and unrelated, but I’m curious how often people are power cycling and if that provides any benefit
• maxclark 5y ago
  Not just a MacBook problem but Apple M1. So far nothing “bad” has happened when my Mac runs out of Ram.
• miohtama 5y ago
  Memory leaks are a feature of a software, not hardware. I read the article and while the Apple and Adobe software can be blamed, there is nothing in this post that it would pin this on the new hardware and the author does not seem to be technical enough to understand this.
  • flatiron 5y ago
    There’s nothing saying that the ARM macOS port isn’t to blame. Porting operating systems is hard.
    • zsmi 5y ago
      Totally agree. I read the article as, when I am on my M1 I often experience memory pressure related issues. Not, because of my M1 I often experience memory pressure related issues. It's very likely future software updates can help address these issues. Honestly, the machines haven't had wide deployment in the field for all that long for Applications as huge as Photoshop. It takes time to discover, fix, and redeploy things like Photoshop. And it's not like Photoshop never leaked memory on an x86.
    • runeks 5y ago
      > There’s nothing saying that the ARM macOS port isn’t to blame. There is. People have been running ARM macOS for about a year and I haven’t seen this complaint before.
  • mcphage 5y ago
    It might be in Rosetta 2, or in the M1 builds of some apps.
    • j4hdufd8 5y ago
      Still not hardware
      • aquadrop 5y ago
        Apple hardware and software are closely linked, it's not like you can use Rosetta2 on any other hardware of your choice.
• BoorishBears 5y ago
  I started with an 8GB M1 Air and it was unusable. But I also regularly leave dozens upon dozens of tabs open and use multiple heavy IDEs... Upgrading to 16GB was enough to fix it instantly and I no longer have the freezing/crashing issues, so I'm surprised 64GB machines are running into it
  • polotics 5y ago
    I recently got an m1 mini, just on principles the 16GB version, and did already get the RAM usage warning once, with my browser going into large memory usage. So there may be something to this story, will watch for it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • erulabs 5y ago
    Huh I have an 8GB air and I run Kubernetes locally and develop a fairly complex system with Skaffold on it (~10 services). Thing is a beast, had no problems at all, but one does need to be aware one is not on the 128GB-of-RAM workstation :P
    • BoorishBears 5y ago
      I mean how much demand will a locally hosted dev service generally have? Nothing about K8s inherently denotes high ram usage. Browsers are generally the biggest culprits for memory usage. Random tabs will leak memory and before you know it some news article page is using 1GB, your GMail is using 1GB, etc.
      • erulabs 5y ago
        Actually my co-founder who is a tab-hoarder has had a few issues. I am a tab minimalist so you're probably right!
    • nyxaiur 5y ago
      Could you check the amount written to your ssd and how long you have the machine?
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Interesting hypothesis that it’s because MacOS doesn’t handle the memory structure well. I would have expected this to have manifested under either arch or neither. These situations are interesting. My M1 13” will occasionally get a stuttering cursor that only goes away with a restart. I haven’t had this problem in over a decade on any computer. I know I’m not unique in this because of the number of threads on the Internet on the issue. Interesting to see the odd interactions between software and hardware. Though this sort of bug does put me in mind of how in Minecraft when Notch fixed light transmission through glass, it would start raining through it too.
  • peakaboo 5y ago
    I had this in Gnome about a year ago, and it was a Gnome memory leak by an extension causing it.
    • renewiltord 5y ago
      Funny. The last time I had this was in 2014 or something when I had too little RAM and the system started swapping. Linux GUIs perform poorly under memory pressure. Way worse than windows or MacOS for some reason. Been a constant experience for me from 2001 when I first started using.
      • pxc 5y ago
        It's not just GUIs. Running out of memory on a Linux system is really bad even if it's a headless server otherwise under light load I think even quantifying memory pressure on Linux is relatively new https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Does-Bad- https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Do... macOS' behavior under high memory pressure is much more graceful IME
  • laweijfmvo 5y ago
    My Intel-based iMac (32GB) has been struggling in Safari lately (more than usual) with stutters and general poor performance; there was a Safari update not too long ago, right?
• jeffbee 5y ago
  Been using an M1 mac and Big Sur on the daily for a year and have never experienced this, and I have the 8GB model where I would notice it. My Control Center is using 29 megabytes.
  • runeks 5y ago
    Seconded. M1 Air, 8GB, Big Sur and no such issues for ~1 year. Maybe a leak in a Max/Pro-specific kernel component? I assume Control Center depends on some hardware-specific kernel modules.
  • mackmgg 5y ago
    I think this specific memory leak is only in Monterey. I definitely have to manually kill Control Center every few days otherwise it'll be using 20GB+ of RAM. Supposedly it's fixed in the 12.1 beta though, so hopefully Apple releases a fix for it soon.
    • webmobdev 5y ago
      The author specifically mentions that he is using macOS Big Sur: "That's extremely similar to the MacBook Pro and Monterey issues I’ve read this week — except I’m still running Big Sur."
    • jeffbee 5y ago
      It really highlights the value of the fleet-wide profiling that ChromeOS enjoys. There’s a dashboard somewhere of what’s using all the space (and time) for ChromeOS users in the wild. But HN just actually hates telemetry more than it hates memory leaks.
    • snazz 5y ago
      I'm running 12.0.1 and Control Center is using ~65 MB, with an uptime of 12 days. This is on an M1 MBA. What type of machine do you have? I wonder if there's some specific software that causes/exacerbates the issue.
• dawnerd 5y ago
  I have the 32 M1 max and safari was using half the memory just opening YouTube. Must be something in the OS if it’s across lots of different apps.
  • romero-jk 5y ago
    A gmail tab consumes a lot of memory for me in safari but no int chrome. Maybe it has something to do with google products ?
  • neurobot123 5y ago
    Why would someone use safari when chrome is available
    • dmitrygr 5y ago
      Battery life is much better with safari. Measurably.
    • alphabettsy 5y ago
      Safari has been more efficient and is better integrated with the OS from my experience.
    • dpratt 5y ago
      It’s significantly better for battery life, it’s a tiny bit more integrated into the OS, and as a bonus it doesn’t send every aspect of my entire browsing history back to Google.
      • eyelidlessness 5y ago
        And that tiny bit goes a long way if you use iCloud Keychain.
    • depereo 5y ago
      Why would someone use chrome when Firefox is available?
    • 5y ago
• soheil 5y ago
  Definitely noticed sporadic freezes on my M1 Air.
  • Toutouxc 5y ago
    No signs of the issue on my 16GB RAM M1 Air. On Monterey, installed on day one, zero reboots since.
• rStar 5y ago
  16/512gb on my m1 mini is a great computer, but it’s not as ‘snappy’ as i thought it would be from all of the reviews. i run a lot of adobe.
  • glennpratt 5y ago
    Lightroom Classic (latest version) is unpleasant on my wife's M1 and even crashes. Last night I moved it over to my gaming PC which is pretty old, but performs much better. It ran on her 2012 Intel MBP and whatever dayjob MBP I had in the past.
    • rStar 5y ago
      i’m hoping adobe has yet to fully optimize for the new architecture, and i’m also hoping they care to do so
      • smoldesu 5y ago
        It could also be that x86 has better SIMD support by a considerable margin, which can make repetitive memory access/serialized workloads a lot faster. I'm not super well intimated with those extensions, but I know that the NEON SIMD implementation in ARMv8 leaves quite a bit to be desired. It's a tricky situation, and one I don't see resolving in a nice clean way. It's stuff like this that makes me hopeful for RISC-V though, where we could theoretically have our cake and eat it too, with dynamic instruction pipelines and incredibly low power usage. Only time will tell, I suppose.
        • my123 5y ago
          Throughput is not an issue on the M1, with 4x 128-bit SIMD units. Neon is certainly not a bad SIMD ISA, it's a quite orthogonal one. You also have the AMX extension at hand, which is more special purpose but allow to deliver very high throughput. (on a regular M1: 350Gflops DGEMM, 1.2Tflops SGEMM, without leveraging anything other than the CPU)
        • aledalgrande 5y ago
• throwntoday 5y ago
  I've had my 14" M1 Pro for just over a week now. It has performed amazingly. But I also don't install tons of random apps and let them run in the background. I never restore from backups, I manually transfer files from my user folder over to my new setup. I always check whether an app has native M1 support before downloading, though I understand this isn't an option for everyones workflow yet. In cases where the app is literally a wrapper for a website like discord, I just use the website. Or in the case of zoom where I just don't trust the app to be on my computer and the website is sufficient. If something I used previous doesn't have native support I look for an alternative and a couple times I have found something better and/or open-source. I understand rosetta 2 has some issues with overusing swap, so I would rather avoid degrading my ssd and experience. So far this has worked for me, and I'm able to get two full day's of battery life. I'm away from my desk far more frequently now. Edit: My control center is using around 1GB of memory. Low enough that it wasn't causing issues but still concerning. It appears there is a memory leak somewhere, hoping a bug-fix is pushed out soon.
• aspaceman 5y ago
  The speculating about the OS arch made me wonder: If such an issue were to occur on iOS without a crash, would anyone even notice? There's no real way to monitor RAM usage, and the failure mode is less clear (slowdown, issue with responsiveness, followed by likely reboot).
  • sudhirj 5y ago
    iOS would likely kill the app as soon as it got out of hand, and rely on the state restoration hook to bring back the state as the user left it. Normal macOS apps don't have that, though. If the leak was in some part of the system, maybe a problem, but I'm sure they test pretty rigorously, and get enough crash reports to figure things out fast with that many devices in the wild, all in pretty constant use.
• typon 5y ago
  Happens to me all the time on my Macbook Pro too. I hate this operating system. What I would give for a Apple hardware + Linux machine.
• alin23 5y ago
  I just ordered the M1 Max with 64GB RAM because I'm constantly getting the "Your system has run out of application memory." popup while working on Lunar[1] in Xcode. Every time this happens, Xcode uses about 4GB of RAM (probably because of the monolithic UI storyboard of Lunar) but it should still leave enough memory for my other non-memory hungry apps. But then I open Activity Monitor and I see WindowServer using ~80GB of memory [2] The only remedy is either `killall WindowServer` or a full reboot. I've been using an M1 MacBook Pro and Monterey since the first developer beta but this only became an issue in the last 2 months or so. [1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar https://github.com/alin23/Lunar [2] https://cln.sh/CfEL6u https://cln.sh/CfEL6u
  • sbr464 5y ago
    Maybe try disabling TrueTone? Also, in Accessibility > Display try enabling Reduce transparency.
  • ArloL 5y ago
    Being serious: Do you have Chrome installed? I have been following this story for a while and nothing seems to be coming out of it: https://chromeisbad.com/ https://chromeisbad.com/ https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1158402 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=115840...
    • arthur6667 5y ago
      I do not use Chrome and my windowserver is using 3GB after a month of uptime. I feel this is not a M1/Apple issue to be honest.
    • ffhhj 5y ago
      > sluggish performance of a 2015 iMac since practically the day we bought it I wish I had found this website when my MacBook Pro was still alive, maybe Chrome actually killed it after all. The low performance was so bad I moved to Windows 10 ("the last Windows system" they said), but after it notified my system can be upgraded to 11 I quickly moved to Ubuntu. I'm currently experiencing a few hiccups and reduced them with some memory tweaks, but still the experience is much better than Mac and Windows.
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  I once had Telegram using 120gb of ram (swap).
  • rangoon626 5y ago
    Telegram has occasionally done this on my Intel Mac mini.
    • rubyist5eva 5y ago
      I think the way it caches media is bugged right out. I changed the cache size preference from 32gb to 8gb and it eased some of the pressure on swap, but it was still insanely high. I had to switch from the App Store version to the "Desktop" version you download from the website.
  • jlokier 5y ago
    Perhaps a coincidence, but Telegram in a Firefox tab also uses a phenomenal amount of ever increasing swapspace. I've seen Firefox reach 67GB with a Telegram tab open, it is distinctly noticable compared to just about everything else I open in the browser.
• opportune 5y ago
  MacOS has had intermittent memory leaks for quite some time. Even my 2013 MBP running an old OS version has all the Apple processes slowly leaking memory until I reboot. I doubt it's directly hardware related, though it's possible it is scoped to special MacOS logic that only is executed on M1. My assumption has been that it's actually coming from shared libraries that Apple-owned processes share, because I usually don't notice it happening for non-Apple processes.
  • fouc 5y ago
    Which OS version? Personally I'm on 2015 MBP with High Sierra 10.13.6 and zero memory leakage. I go months without even turning off the MBP. Granted, sometimes I get memory leakage behavior from Chrome/Firefox. I usually stick to Safari.
• blakesterz 5y ago
  I wish it was just memory leaks on my M1 Mini! Sometimes it just crashes. This has rarely happened on Linux. This sometimes happen on MacOS to the point where I don't trust it. At all. Ever. I have to save everything I'm working on constantly, just in case. Sometimes apps just stop working. Right now telegram just won't start. No matter what. Never happens on Linux. Sometimes it won't wake up from sleep. Never on Linux. Sometimes it loses the keyboard and/or mouse. This never happens on Linux. Sometimes the screensaver works, sometimes it doesn't. Grep is slow, waaay slower than on Linux. So are other random CLI things. How? Why? Docker... don't get me started, and don't make excuses. (~700 people at Mirantis and ~150k at Apple can't figure this out?) Everything runs slower on MacOS. Every. Thing. grep, sed, awk. Why don't sed, awk, grep, etc.. all the Linux things work quite right? I need to add something else on macOS to get them to work like they did on Linux. It's always "almost" but never do they work like I'd expect. I need to remember to turn off my monitor at night, because some nights it just randomly turns on. Never on Linux. Maybe it'll wake up, maybe not. I figured out if I unplug my headphones and/or webcam I can force it. All of these super basic things just DON'T work. It sucks. I could forgive Linux, but not an OS and Hardware made by the biggest company on the damn planet. I get it, this is faster than a 4 year old laptop. But that's not what I'm comparing it to. I'm comparing it to a 5 year old system I built myself from random parts that runs an open system operating system. That's a pretty low bar, and it doesn't win.
  • dimgl 5y ago
    This is literally the opposite of what most people claim. Does anyone else have these issues? I actually just ordered an M1 MacBook myself.
    • newbie2020 5y ago
      I have all the issues the parent post is commenting about. I thought I was crazy... but same happens to me. Simple stuff... why doesn't sleep to wake work correctly? Why are my peripherals schizophrenic? My Windows 98 Compaq didn't have these issues... and that was two decades ago.
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
• IceWreck 5y ago
  Apple's great hardware is crippled by the piece of shit operating system called macOS. Man up Apple and release Apple Silicon drivers for Linux.
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't post generic-indignant comments, or take HN threads into flamewar, or call names in comments here. That all pushes discussion in the direction we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • FPGAhacker 5y ago
    I know you are venting, but seriously, I use macs for macOS. Otherwise I’d be buying much cheaper hardware. Mac hardware is nice, but it’s not that nice. Except for maybe the trackpad.
    • IceWreck 5y ago
      Apple Silicon has a lower power draw than any comparable AMD or Intel chip. I'd like to use one of those Mac Minis as a homeserver/homelab and macOS is the only thing standing in the way. Similarly, I doubt there is a non Apple laptop that matches the M1 Macbook Air's battery life to performance ratio, specially in that form factor. I know Asahi linux exists but reverse engineered drivers will never be as effective/performant as official drivers. Porting drivers to Linux won't even be expensive for Apple. They refuse to do it just cause theyre Apple.
    • cma 5y ago
      I don't think there is anything else where you can run that much GPU power on battery as well as wired in a form factor anywhere close and with integrated system/gpu memory. The AMD APUs haven't gotten close yet, but as things start moving to LPDDR5 maybe they will.
    • alxlu 5y ago
      I personally haven’t been able to find another laptop with the same battery life, design, trackpad, and screen quality of mac hardware. I bought an M1 max laptop and I’m almost tempted to go back to my Linux machine because of several issues I have with macOS. There are things that are by design like mandatory animation delays for things like switching spaces and going in/out of fullscreen, which are borderline dealbreakers for me given how often I do those things. And there are also things I suspect are either bugs or straight up performance lapses, such as scrolling through text in a terminal at 4k being slow if you have ligatures enabled. I could go on, but I think it’s a perfectly valid sentiment (regardless of whether or not they were venting) to wish for mac hardware with a Linux OS.
• threeseed 5y ago
  It's probably worth reminding everyone who is new to the Mac or like most of us keep forgetting. Don't update your OS until at least half way through its update lifecycle e.g. for Monterey wait until 12.0.5. This happens every single year where there are annoying/serious bugs that takes a while to get fixed as the focus is on P1 showstoppers.
  • glogla 5y ago
    I do that as well - I have work Mac and personal one, and I don't want to run them with different OS versions since Apple loves to change things between versions for no reason (last time they renamed "grab" to "screenshot" and needlessly reordered System Preferences) so using two versions of Mac OS is super annoying. And corporate takes a while to get all their crap running on a new version.
  • dwaite 5y ago
    12.1 is already in beta.
    • john_alan 5y ago
      Currently 12.1 has this issue though.
  • eyelidlessness 5y ago
    I tend to stay 1-2 years behind. But that hasn’t been an option on new hardware since at least the early OS X days, if not maybe Classic MacOS.
    • droidist2 5y ago
      Yeah, I recently updated to Catalina. I had to Google to find the download link, but it was still available from apple.com
      • latexr 5y ago
        You can download the full installers from the command-line: https://512pixels.net/2019/10/download-macos-installers-with-terminal/ https://512pixels.net/2019/10/download-macos-installers-with... Wikipedia shows the exact version number of the latest releases for each.
• wirrbel 5y ago
  interesting, I just discovered a Touch Bar daemon process consuming > 4 GB of memory on my 8GB MacBook, a clear leak.
• itwy 5y ago
  I have a MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5, 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3) and now on macOS Monterey everything just feels sluggish (especially the animations) and crashes sometimes. It just feels the OS is designed for different, more recent hardware. I have been using Mac since 2010 and that wasn't the case in the past. I paid about $3,000 for this device. I am not happy and considering Linux/Windows.
• thuccess129 5y ago
  Apple has bunny hopped hardware architectures, successfully. The time is right to switch from the 70s FreeBSD software environment to Bell Labs's 9P concept-oriented operating system jazzed up with Apple's delightfully intuitive UX Pixar styled art and animation. Linux is a step sideways from the BSDs.
  • bink 5y ago
    That sounds like a whole lotta work for very little gain.
• rukshn 5y ago
  I have been using an M1 MBA for nearly a year, and I have never faced any issues or memory leaks. It has been solid as a rock. I recently had to use a Windows laptop for work, and god I hate when windows becomes "not responding"
  • altcognito 5y ago
    Since we all seem to be sharing that we don't have issues with our OSs, I've never had much issue with any NT based Windows systems. I've had bad hardware that once replaced improved reliability, but generally speaking I can go months without reboots. (except for those corporate forced updates for security reasons, but those exist on every platform, so I don't consider that an issue)
    • andai 5y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHafyiDTR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReHafyiDTR0 On the last few versions of Windows, it doesn't really feel like my computer anymore. I use my OS to lay out the structure of my thoughts, ie. I'll have text documents open, arranged in a certain way, project folders open, image editors with sketches in them... then Windows Update wakes my computer while I am sleeping and force-closes everything; I awake to a blank slate. It's as though someone has snuck into my house in in the middle of the night and swept everything off my desk and into the trash.
      • genewitch 5y ago
        Block the windows update domain names or get an application firewall (fortinet makes some cheap ones) and disallow windows update. It does suck that you gotta do this, but at least there is a way.
      • muro 5y ago
        I'm glad new editors auto save everything and can restart without issues. Just a shame the os doesn't do it for all apps.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
• frazbin 5y ago
  Don't worry everyone, I'm not experiencing this issue. -- Apple flans
  • dang 5y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
    • mousepilot 5y ago
      can some mod do something about this user "dang"? he seems to crapflood every discussion I try to read with these stupid judgemental comments and never contributes to the discussions, doesn't hacker news employ moderators of any sort? I know I'm a new user and don't have enough "karma" or whatever to downvote but this guy is one of the most irritating and useless commenters I've ever seen, and that comes from someone who has used reddit and slashdot for quite a bit.
      • slater 5y ago
        not sure if that's some in-joke copy-pasta, but dang IS a mod, here.
        • mousepilot 5y ago
          lol wtf
      • dang 5y ago
        I'm one of the moderators here (and currently the only one who posts publicly as a mod). Sorry that wasn't clear. If it helps at all, the comments you're complaining about are even more tedious to write than they are to read. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
• frazbin 5y ago
  Jumping in to point out that while this stuff happens on linux, at least one doesn't feel so hand-wrigingly powerless when it does. I know it's a choice between starting a career in maintenance and complete learned helplessness.. and the former option well seem a lot more appealing when it's no longer available.
• shrimpx 5y ago
  My M1 Air gets a ton of abuse and I don't see any abnormal perf issues. There was a super annoying bug where the laptop would crash when I closed the lid with a bluetooth mouse connected, but that's it. I'm still on Big Sur, maybe Monterey is buggy.
• aledalgrande 5y ago
  Managing shared memory is not a new thing for Apple, as it has been doing the same on iOS for a long time. Maybe a bug in Monterey? None of the M1 users I know had this issue.
• x3sphere 5y ago
  I haven’t had any issues. I sometimes run two VMs at a time on my 13” MBP with 16GB RAM and although the memory usage is almost maxed most of the time it’s been running fine.
• makecheck 5y ago
  I saw this recently primarily with Firefox and (presumably?) Firefox may have been updated to fix the issue because it is thankfully not happening anymore. When it did happen though, it seemed ludicrous: that a single app could in a matter of literally minutes start burning through gigabytes of memory, to the point where the entire system seems to freeze with no option except to kill Firefox (and everything it may be doing) to continue. And, like the author, I had started keeping Activity Monitor open so I could pre-kill Firefox at a point when I knew it would probably start to be pushing it. It never feels good to baby-sit a machine. It feels even worse when it’s an expensive new machine. And it means that the operating system is failing at its most basic task (arguably the entire point of having an operating system) — to manage resources well.
  • david_allison 5y ago
    Likely this OS bug regarding mouse cursors. Improved but not fixed in Firefox 94: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735345 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735345
  • swiftcoder 5y ago
    > And it means that the operating system is failing at its most basic task (arguably the entire point of having an operating system) — to manage resources well. Before about 2001, that would be a bold claim indeed in the Mac world. Pre-emptive multitasking only became a thing with the transition to BSD-based OS X
• ummonk 5y ago
  Is it specific to M1? On my Intel Macbook Pro I have to restart Safari daily to fix memory leaks that make the address bar incredibly unresponsive (even closing tabs doesn't work - I have to quit and reopen the app).
• fmajid 5y ago
  There is apparently a bug in the buffer cache, that can be alleviated by regular purges: https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2021/20211029_0832-diglloydTool-IntegrityChecker-caching.html https://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2021/20211029_0832-digl...
• BrianHenryIE 5y ago
  > I now keep Activity Monitor open while I work I also do this, but I wonder is it a bad idea? Is Activity Monitor enabling any extra logging that itself is slowing things down further, or is it just subscribing to already enabled events? I'm on M1 MBA 16GB and I get the out-of-memory errors too. It's still a world of difference from the 2016 MBP I upgraded from. As touched on in another comment, the problem might be the 8 desktops and 20 Firefox windows I keep open.
  • noduerme 5y ago
    I've always tried to avoid keeping Activity Monitor open. On my current 2015 MBA, it doesn't eat up a lot of memory, but it usually does list itself as a top consumer of CPU cycles, often 15-20%. Running `top` in the terminal only eats about 2%. It would be ironic if Activity Monitor itself were causing a memory leak.
    • userbinator 5y ago
      I'm a long-time Windows user and it's customary to keep Task Manager open (more for its tray icon) to keep an eye on what the system is doing. Is that not common in the Mac world?
      • novok 5y ago
        We have apps like istat menus that behave similarly. Activity Monitor doesn't create a menubar icon that lets you monitor system state like the windows equivalent, but it's dock/taskbar icon can be set to behave the same. I also think windows task manager is fairly efficient and TBH more useful with their full system state graph view. You have to click one resource at a time to see system state of your memory, cpu, etc and there is no GPU graph like windows.
      • mlindner 5y ago
        Opening it from time to time, sure, keeping it open, no. Power users may install a menu bar applet to track the stuff but you generally don't need to bother.
      • 5y ago
• avidphantasm 5y ago
  Haven’t been bitten by memory leak issues yet, but I feel for you. I had an M1 mini for nine months (lightly used) and had no problems. Switched from an i9 MBP 16” to an M1 Pro 14” a week or two ago. Have had zero problems and it’s the best computer I’ve ever had and fastest new computer I have ever used. MATLAB is 2 times fast than my Windows desktop at work, which was substantially faster than my i9 MBP. Oh and MATLAB isn’t even native yet, but running under Rosetta 2. I also have never heard the fans, even with two 4K displays attached, which ran all the time on my i9 MBP. These chips and machines are incredible.
  • ac42 5y ago
    > I also have never heard the fans We all do now
• waynecochran 5y ago
  Ironically this horrible website is itself a memory pig -- holy crap ... the ads ...
  • mlindner 5y ago
    What ads?
• noduerme 5y ago
  Reading this with mild concern as I'm waiting for my first M1 Max, a couple questions spring to mind... * I wonder if this is more prevalent when the hard drive is approaching full capacity? It would be interesting to see the breakdown between physical and swap when it happens. * Has anyone observed these seemingly random memory leaks while not running anything under Rosetta 2?
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  It may have to do with many of the new Mac (Apple-authored) apps being Catalyst apps. Not sure. I feel that Catalyst is a bit of a "stopgap" solution, so it may not be as thoroughly optimized as a more permanent solution. I'll bet something new comes out, once the entire line is switched to MX chips. For myself, I just got the new M1Max 14-inch MBP, and it's quite nice. I had to remove my Thunderbolt docks (I have a range of docks, including ones purported to be "Thunderbolt 4") from the video chain. I have found that the computer seems to lose track of what is where, if I have a dock in the loop.
  • bitigchi 5y ago
    Catalyst is the stopgap before SwiftUI. Eventually we'll see all Apple apps migrated to SwiftUI from AppKit, UIKit, and Catalyst.
    • novok 5y ago
      SwiftUI is still better called beta software at this point, to the point where 1password abandoned it mid rewrite to go to electron. It's gonna be a few more years at least.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
        Considering that many corporations are just, now, beginning to take up Swift, after it has been out for seven years, I'd say this was a pretty sure bet. I like SwiftUI. It shows a lot of promise, and I look forward to releasing products, written in it. I don't think it's especially mature, and maturity is important, when you need to release ambitious projects. I'm not really in a hurry, though. I'll be getting around to working in SwiftUI, and I tend to do well at the things to which I apply myself.
    • lonelyasacloud 5y ago
      Yeah, possibly, but seems 50-50 that that Catalyst stopgap is until Apple thinks iPadOS plus some virtualisation is good enough to replace macOS.
• ioseph 5y ago
  My main pain point aside from random OS crashes is Bluetooth / audio. The sound device will just drop working randomly whether 3.5mm Jack or Bluetooth. Restarting the service sometimes works sometimes not, at first I thought it was MS Teams but didn't seem app specific. Makes video calls painful knowing either sound or mic could just stop working at any time.
  • k8sToGo 5y ago
    Why does this sound so similar to a Hackintosh? Honestly, I assumed people get a real Mac so they don't have to fiddle around with reboots etc
    • novok 5y ago
      Bluetooth issues are often associated with endpoint security software such as jamf, crowdstrike and carbon black. If these issues are happening on your work laptop especially, you might have those things installed on them without you realizing it. Apple's attitude towards endpoint security software is basically, "it's stupid and you shouldn't have them installed, our recommendation is to uninstall them" so that's that. "Third party “endpoint security” software may cause slow simulators, system freezes, or prevent debug processes from running in simulators reliably. This sometimes manifests as debugserver disconnections or simulator applications receiving a SIGKILL signal. (55853555) Workaround: Uninstall the third party software." https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-notes/xcode-11_2-release-notes https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode-release-note...
      • ioseph 5y ago
        Interesting, I do have jamf but no option to disable it due to corporate policy
      • dwaite 5y ago
        Note that this also was when Apple released the EndpointSecurity framework specifically made to sandbox these sorts of corporate malware in user space and outside the kernel.
• coldtea 5y ago
  I feel like I'm a bizarro world, because I don't get this stuff: crashes, memory leaks, and so on. I use: VScode, Idea, iTerm2 (with x86 brew), Logic (and lots of plugins), FCPX, Live (x86, and lots of plugins), Slack, Reeder, MS Office, Spotify, Chrome and other stuff. MBP M1 16GB. What I do get, is some bluetooth issues (e.g. affecting the mouse cursor. If you start the bluetooth deadmon it fixes itself for a day or so.
  • alfalfasprout 5y ago
    You're not in a bizarro world. Most users are pretty happy with their M1 Macs (myself included) and HN just tends to upvote anything anti-apple even if it's an isolated experience. I'd wager most people on this thread do not actually own an m1 Mac. My experience (and that of others I know that have them) has been nothing but stellar.
    • addicted 5y ago
      Unfortunately it’s comments and religious defenders like this that allow Apple to get away with selling broken products for years, and then issue recalls for products sold 4-5 years ago when people are not using them anymore, like they’ve done with multiple Mac laptops that had graphics card and screen issues.
    • bserge 5y ago
      HN has more Apple "fans" than "haters". And they will downvote anything bad about Apple lol
    • jlpom 5y ago
      I own a M1 8 gb and It has to go through multiple reboots/day with lot of open tabs/apps on Monterey
      • wait_a_minute 5y ago
        Was it doing that before Monterey? I haven't upgraded to Monterey yet because I want to avoid any bugs that haven't been ironed out yet...so far my M1 8gb has been excellent and if those issues are introduced by Monterey then I may just delay upgraading until next year sometime.
• rsp1984 5y ago
  I have no proof but a strong gut feeling the root cause of this is broken OpenGL drivers. Here's why: Over the past several months we've been very busy porting our Android- and Windows-based 3D Capturing app to iOS. We have quite a bit of OpenGL (ES) code that needed to be migrated. After a couple of initial hiccups things appeared to work well, however something was off. OpenGL code that's fast and completely unproblematic on Win/Android caused weird CPU stalls and after some minutes of app usage typically everything just crashed. After some digging and debugging it became clear that certain OpenGL function calls were leaking memory like crazy, as in several MB per call. Concretely I'm talking about glBlitFramebuffer() and glCopyTex(Sub)Image2D() . Both of these operate on frame buffers (memory that's often as large as your app window size) and they were internally allocating new buffers on every call and apparently never freed them. Now of course this is iOS and the article is talking about MacOS but it's quite likely that Apple derived their M1-targeted OpenGL implementation for MacOS from the iOS version which has always targeted Apple SoCs. Given the amount of OpenGL-based software still out there and Apple's deprecation of OpenGL in favour of Metal (they just don't seem to care any more) those kinds of large scale memory leaks don't really surprise me. OpenGL is still pretty much everywhere and if you have bad memory leaks in core framebuffer operations things start to accumulate very quickly.
  • dlivingston 5y ago
    Great perspective, thanks. FWIW, I notice the memory leaks particularly with “Control Center”, which is an Apple extension to the task bar. I wouldn’t expect any Apple-written code to be using any OpenGL; it should all be in Metal.
    • crest 5y ago
      Do you know how long the Carbon API survived inside the Finder?
      • saagarjha 5y ago
        macOS still uses Carbon for much of the menu bar and internal event routing.
• nightshift1 5y ago
  For the past 10 months, I’ve used a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro supplied by my employer. How is this possible ? The M1 MBP is only available since October 26.
  • Southland 5y ago
    Not true. There was a 13inch M1 MBP available. It just was not the redesign that has non usb-c ports, etc.
  • mmcconnell1618 5y ago
    M1 MacBook Pro (13 inch) and M1 MacBook Air were released near the end of last year. The newest machines (14 and 16 inch) and the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro. The combination of "MacBook Pro" and "M1 Pro CPU" can be confusing. The original poster appears to have gotten an original M1 CPU in the 13 MacBook Pro about 10 months ago from their employer.
• bchris4 5y ago
  There wasn’t any mention of how much free hard drive space this machine has, which I believe is more relevant than ever now, isn’t it?
• brtknr 5y ago
  Lol the timing of this complaint couldn’t be more timely with the arrival of new 14-inch MBP…
• kryz 5y ago
  It’s Dropbox…
• dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Been using M1 Pro for a week now. Docker (amd64) runs waaay slower. App crash (mostly Safari) at least once a day. Haven't noticed memory leaks.
• jstsch 5y ago
  Hm. I got my M1 Max on the morning of 30 October... % uptime 23:27 up 9 days, 11:24, 4 users, load averages: 2.19 2.77 2.91 :) so no issues here.
• dschuler 5y ago
  I've been having some sort of severe performance issue in one form or another since Mojave/Catalina or so with a 2017 MBP and a 2020 M1 Mac Mini. The symptoms is always generally poor performance after the system has been running a while (4h to a week, varies), usually with WindowServer using CPU cycles non-stop and UI that felt choppy across all programs. This seemed to happen frequently after "opening many files", like doing some recompiling with Xcode for a few hours, or indexing a large volume with Spotlight. Rebooting helps temporarily. Today I realized that data read/written since boot was about 1TB in a few hours on a brand new OS install, and I traced this back to the com.apple.Safari.History process. Somehow having bookmarks and previously using Safari 15.x caused a huge amount of I/O that wouldn't stop - the solution was to remove all bookmarks and reading list items. Performance was immediately back to normal, no reboot needed. So just logging in with your iCloud id, you could be "importing" whatever performance problem you're having on a new install. I recommend you reboot and take a look at your disk I/O stats - maybe this will help someone!
  • MarcoZavala 5y ago
  • jtbayly 5y ago
    Thanks for this tip. I’ve had a similar problem occasionally and this gives me an idea for some things to check.
  • karmelapple 5y ago
    Have you looked at Keychain items as well? It seems to go very slow for me, and I wonder if that’s part of some similar-sounding slowdown I have. Quitting Safari seems to resolve the slowness, but not always.
  • sswastioyono18 5y ago
    Yes, noticed this some time ago with WindowServer taking all my CPU usage but only twice so far for this year I think so it was okay. When it occurs every day then I will start to worry then
• m0zg 5y ago
  And that is why I won't be buying one until at least 2025, and unless they also remove all on-device spyware and let me power it off for real without it broadcasting its own location when shut down.
• porcoda 5y ago
  No problems for me with my M1 Mac. Heavy use of compilers, numerical tools (both native apple silicon and some that still need to run under Rosetta), a couple different editors, some specialized analysis tools, and the usual set of desktop apps for day to day work and fun. My workload tends to be pretty demanding of a machine (modeling+simulation where I can soak up every core and bit of RAM available to me). I can’t remember when I had to reboot the machine other than OS updates.
• jron 5y ago
  I'm also experiencing this on 1 of 2 M1 MacBook Pro Max 32GB machines. I've performed a full wipe/restore on the faulty MacBook and the issue persists. WindowsServer is usually the faulty process consuming 20+ GB of RAM. The only difference between machines is one uses icloud and the other doesn't. Given the similarities between both machines and application usage, I can't help but suspect some type of hardware issue is plaguing a percentage of machines out there.
  • dbmnt 5y ago
    You didn't tell us the most important part -- does the machine exhibiting the memory leak problem use iCloud or not? Assuming the iCloud-enabled machine is the one with the problem, it seems odd to jump to the conclusion it's hardware? That's a lot of extra code running on the machine; not just iCloud itself but every single iCloud-aware app. There's a lot of additional potential surface area with iCloud enabled.
    • jron 5y ago
      The iCloud enabled MacBook is the one leaking memory. I'm leaning towards a hardware issue because the iCloud setup is the OS default and the number of reported issues is still low. Edit: A recent reddit thread may have correctly identified the WindowServer leak being related to the amount of full screen video played. My impacted MacBook is often used for Netflix/Hulu content. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/qos5n5/memory_leaks_are_crippling_my_m1_macbook_proand/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/qos5n5/memory_leaks_...
• jdalgetty 5y ago
  I'm not seeing this on my M1 Mac Mini
• johnklos 5y ago
  "I write for a magazine and web site called MacWorld, yet I'm unable, unwilling, or both, to really look in to the problem. Let me complain and hope someone from Apple reaches out."
  • philosopher1234 5y ago
    Why is it his job to debug the issue? Raising awareness so that Apple prioritizes it is useful too.
• smcleod 5y ago
  Interestingly I have seen this on mm _Intel_ Macbook Pro - but _not_ on my M1 Macbook Air. I've noticed worst applications for this are those built on the Electron framework (MS Teams, Slack, Evernote).
• slaymaker1907 5y ago
  I've been dealing with a weird memory leak on my Windows desktop for a out a year now. For some reason, dwm.exe (this seems to be the window manager) uses more and more dedicated GPU memory. This is really weird since it uses so much that apparently Windows does paging of GPU memory.
• buggythebug 5y ago
  good
• odilontalk 5y ago
  Zed Shaw posted on Twitter his findings about Safari memory leak here in this thread [1]. Seems to be related to video tag and according the comments here people are on YT or other sites that have videos embedded. [1] https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1457387347700588550 https://twitter.com/lzsthw/status/1457387347700588550
• noduerme 5y ago
  This may sound random, just my gut feeling for debugging kicking in. Since Control Center seems to be implicated in this, and Control Center opens ports for Airplay connectivity[1], has anyone tried turning off Airplay sharing? Or just turning off wifi/connectivity completely and seeing if the memory pressure lets up? [1] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/682332 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/682332
  • jron 5y ago
    I have Airplay disabled on both of my machines and only one has been impacted by the leak.
• solitus 5y ago
  My hot reload JS dev server crashes on my M1 16GB between 1 to 7 times a week. This has never happened on my Windows 10 desktop machine (16GB too) with the same code base. My M1 is still ~15% faster though.
• FetusP 5y ago
  Test
• cryptica 5y ago
  I still don't understand why the majority of people haven't switched to Ubuntu or Kubuntu... They're quite user-friendly nowadays and they perform amazingly well. I often go for months without restarting my Kubuntu laptop. It performs exactly the same as it did years ago when I first bought it. What I like most about Linux though is that it's open source. It actually feels like my laptop. I have Windows installed on it as a dual-boot and I cannot believe it when I log into Windows (Windows is definitely worse than Apple)... I just don't understand WTF happened over the past decade; Windows seems to have gone backwards. There is no way in the world I could ever use this thing and be productive. The interface is so clunky with title bars which use up all the valuable screen real estate. Difficult to switch between different windows. The cursor was almost impossible to use with the touchpad (it just feels unresponsive); astonishingly, I was actually able to get the touchpad working well with Kubuntu with the generic open source touchpad driver which came with it (it's extremely customizable). Somehow, the narratives around open source software being inferior quality always seem to be disproved in the long run. While the quality of enterprise software tends to degrade overtime (as big corporation financial politics and bureaucracy creep in). Open source projects are free from toxic financial incentives so they tend to keep improving over time.
  • sgadimbayli 5y ago
    I love my Regolith/Ubuntu setup and don't want to move anywhere. However, I can't find a decent machine which will last for 4 5 hours on battery, and it is important. My brand new Thinkpad T14 lasts less than 3 hours, and I am on minimalistic setup with only few apps running. Tried all kinds of power management tweaks. OTHER thing is the issue with the microphone on external devices in Linux which is pain, which is why I always have to use my phone for calls.
• perryizgr8 5y ago
  No problem. Ram is very cheap nowadays. Just get a stick of 16 gb DDR4 ram and slide it in.
• durpkingOP 5y ago
  you are the beta tester
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 95014_refugee 5y ago
  "I don't understand how virtual memory systems work, but I know that if I write an article complaining about <new Apple thing> I'll get a ton of traffic". The Activity Monitor screenshot in the embedded tweet even explains what's going on. The system has 64G of physical memory. A bit less than 50GB is in use (so 14G is completely idle, wasted). 7G are wired (kernel, device buffers, etc.) and can't be paged. 38G are in used caching things for applications, and about 180G worth of compressed data (mostly zeros I'd say, since it's only using 5G of real memory) has avoided being paged out. There is literally no memory pressure in this system, and no evidence of leakage in those numbers. Darwin deliberately tries to keep as much DRAM as possible live to minimise page-in and decompression costs; it literally can't find anything worth paging in or decompressing to fill those last 14G. That's a vacuum, not pressure. I'm not going to debate the stability issues that the article author is complaining about; I do hope they have all of the crash reporting features enabled so that their crash data can be used by the various developers to help fix things. But I would hope that before writing yet another stupid clickbait article, they pick a topic they know something about.
  • whatever1 5y ago
    The second screenshot literally shows safari occupying 30+ G of memory. What the hell is it caching? The entire internet? Or maybe is it just memory leak?
  • herpderperator 5y ago
    > 38G are in used caching things for applications The 38G isn't "cached app memory" (there is no such thing), it's actual resident memory, calculated as the sum of the second column. The same as "RES" in Linux. There is no memory cache that differentiates apps from non-apps (whatever that is?), there is just regular file memory cache, which is labelled below the application memory section, shown to be using 13G. Every file you open on your system (read: app you open, file that macOS accesses, etc.) will be automatically read into the file cache and left there until some event, such as not having any unused memory since all of it is used as cache, requires some contents of the cache to be evicted to make room for an application. If this system had been low on RAM, this "Control Center" app would have been paging to disk to make room for the gigantic 26G it "needs" (the fact that it needs this much is a bug/leak. It should not be showing a number that high in that field, which is the resident memory required by the app.) In summary, unused memory is meant to be used for caching files (see https://www.linuxatemyram.com/ https://www.linuxatemyram.com/). The cache is lowest priority and almost considered "free" memory, in the sense that the cache can be evicted anytime to make room for actual application resident memory. In this case, "Control Center" is using 26G of resident memory, not cache (which is not shown in that column at all.) This is a bug/memory leak.
• tumblewit 5y ago
  What I find common on such threads is Linux users bashing how Apple users are suckers. I don't get the point of such comments. Most people on HN can already figure out how to build their own PC, install and configure the distro of their choice. But thats not even relevant as everyone is pointing out the flaws in software so that the company responsible will fix them. Bragging about Linux makes no sense, many of us using Macs here most likely already have a linux box as well.
• stock_toaster 5y ago
  The browser taking up so much memory are probably just object/memory leaking advertising scripts. Run an adblocker and watch the memory usage of your browser tabs go down significantly!
  • zinekeller 5y ago
    Nope. As pointed out, Firefox had a nasty bug that was interacting with an Apple bug that causes memory leaks. Firefox has fixed the bug but from their comments it seems that it was more of a workaround around the Apple bug rather than a fix.
• kenneth 5y ago
  I've been dealing with this ever since a software update to the M1 MBP last summer and it's been an absolute nightmare. It's obviously some kind of system-level memory leak, because my workflow is just basic apps (Superhuman, Chrome, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp are the only apps running most of the time; with the occasional other stuff like Keynote). I used to do software development, running a million things at once and in decades I can't remember last time I saw the out of memory error. Sure, slow downs due to swap, but never straight up the error forcing me to kill apps. On the M1 MBP, this error modal would pop up dozens of times a day. I would literally be constantly be quitting any app i'm not directly working on. It'd take a few days to get to this point, but at this point nothing other than a reboot would get it back to normal. The memory total for the apps running (plus the background stuff like Dropbox) was way below the built in 16GB, not to mention zero swap to SSD. Somehow there must be a leak in the OS. Currently sitting at: WhatsApp Helper (Renderer) 3.57GB WhatsApp 1.37GB Dropbox 1.13 GB WindowServer 1.05GB etc. This is not normal…
• notorandit 5y ago
  Once more, hardware is little use without good programming...
• john_alan 5y ago
  Still an issue in latest 12.1 beta. Really frustrating. Just dropped a chunk of change on an M1 Pro too.
• arthur6667 5y ago
  I dunno, my M1 with 8GB is not even really usong swap afer a month of uptime and heavy loads memory-wise (VM's mostly). Based on other comments: try not using chrome. I don't and I have 0 issues iwht this.
• ksec 5y ago
  > There are also lengthy Hacker News and Reddit threads with users recounting their experiences. For many years, the press kept HN a secret and wouldn't even link or mention it as source. Presumably to keep HN from falling into mainstream. There were lots of times you could tell they got it from HN, or even screenshot without mentioning the site. But for the past 2 years it seems more and more mainstream media are giving direct links. I could only wish the first rule for mainstream media is to not talk about HN. But then I guess it is too late.
• jarek83 5y ago
  Having this on my 13 inch Macbook Pro M1. After upgrading to Monterey it also started to heat-up without any heavy app being open. In Big Sur I had to open say OpenTTD to make it warm. Now it's just browser and IDE doing that.
• darthrupert 5y ago
  I wonder if Apple's hardware people are going nuts from the fact that they created a world record chip and its potential is being wastes by subpar OS. Further, I wonder how much of their vast resources might Apple be pouring into making a new OS without these problems.