3 ms·

The most mind-blowing thing about the M1 is that I've never seen the beachball cursor for the entire system ever since I got mine. Used to be a daily occurrence

The most mind-blowing thing about the M1 is that I've never seen the beachball cursor for the entire system ever since I got mine. Used to be a daily occurrence on my 2012 macbook pro and drove me nuts at times. This one is ridiculously responsive. On and I've only managed to get the fans to audibly spin after several minutes of compiling an Android app with a huge native library on an x86 NDK for 4 architectures.

spacexsucks 5y ago
Yeah no. Depends on how you use it. I see the beach ball on my M1 every time I try to compile rust or haskell. This M1 fanboyism is tiring
- pschastain 5y ago
  Because only your experience matters
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    Just like only the fanboys experience matters?
    - pschastain 5y ago
      Please point out where I said that
- threeseed 5y ago
  That would imply you are trying to multi-task whilst compiling Rust/Haskell. Chances are it has nothing to do with M1 and everything to do with your SSD being overwhelmed.
  - supernovae 5y ago
    that’s the thing with computers, performance is always nuanced… Latest Intel’s are fast, latest AMDs are fast, latest Apple silicon are fast and we’ve never really had it better. I’m super happy to be back in desktop arena with user replaceable parts and capacity.. 32 core, 128gb ram, non soc systems for me at prices i could only dream of a few years ago.
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    If your are using vscode with the rust analyzer plugin, you are constantly "compiling". This is how the inline hints, errors, typehints are done. My 3 year old i5 laptop struggled with this, my new desktop 12th gen i7 has the power so it never slows down, but if you look at the syst monitor, you can see that it does do quite some work. If you have this plus some of the other electron hogs (teams, slack, a browser with 30 tabs of stack overflow), your system does have a proper load.
  - spacexsucks 5y ago
    Maybe but given that it is an apple machine things arent user replaceable.
- addaon 5y ago
  Compiling can use an arbitrarily large amount of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth. After all, if more of the critical resource were available, using it would allow compilation to complete faster, which would be a win. The beach ball occurs when some UI process does not service its event loop. This can be an issue with the process, or it can be caused because that process is contending for resources with the compilation processes. If the critical resource that's causing a beachball here is CPU, there's two very easy paths forward: either modify your compilation scripts to use fewer threads than the system has physical performance cores, or run the compilation at a higher nice level. In either case the UI process should be able to get CPU when it needs it and not beachball. The higher nice level is generally both the easier and more effective solution, since it will allow the compilation process to continue to use all cores when UI processes are not scheduled. If the critical resource is memory the system will page, which will turn the critical resource into disk bandwidth. Fixes specific to memory usage here are to get more memory (not really actionable), or to reduce parallelism on the build process. If the critical resource is disk bandwidth, this is the hardest problem to fix. To my knowledge MacOS doesn't provide good tools for managing disk priority. If the disk bandwidth being used is to access build-related files (source, object files, etc) rather than swap, one possibility is to use a thunderbolt-connected external SSD for the build artifacts, leaving the internal storage for swap and for the UI program. However, if your build process is using so many disk operations that it's starving a UI program, you're likely to see a performance hit going to a slower external SSD.
  - sonofhans 5y ago
    Your comment is one reason I still love this place. A brief snarky comment is taken seriously in the best way with a well-considered and comprehensive reply. It’s like watching a Zen koan play out.
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  Rust and Haskell are infamously slow to compile.
- benreesman 5y ago
  Word of caution: many (most?) Linux distributions are vulnerable to various hard crashes with -j >= num_cores, and sometimes getting the physical machine or instance restarted is a pain! So you probably also want to fix these builds if you use any of this Rust or Haskell software on Linux. Also SpaceX doesn’t suck, you suck. :P
- Tagbert 5y ago
  But the real question is whether you ever saw the beach ball when doing these compiles on Intel processors? It is not that the M-series chips can never trigger a beachball but that there are significantly fewer scenarios where that happens to the point that many users never find themselves in those scenarios. You see their enthusiasm as fanboyism and they could see you as being grumpy, but the you are just both seeing different parts of a distribution curve.
ravenstine 5y ago
Oh you can definitely get the beach ball, but I pretty much only get it from things I would expect to get it from. If you're doing things that aren't graphically expensive, then yeah, the M1 means next to no weird hangups in my experience. I'd be surprised if you never got the beach ball.
- grishka 5y ago
  I do get it but only when an app is blocking its UI thread. The rest of the system is still responsive. On my old macbook I'd get a beachball and the entire system would freeze for seconds at a time.
listless 5y ago
Install Teams
- cyberge99 5y ago
  Teams is absolute garbage. Every single app on my MBMax opens instantly except for teams (and Affinity Photo, which I’d expect). It literally takes 15 seconds to join a meeting with one of the fastest user computers available. Absolutely horrible garbage of an app. Microsoft has zero incentive to fix it, because they have a captive audience i. Their enterprise customers.
  - butlerm 5y ago
    It might have serious problems on the Mac. On Windows it is generally quite nice, and I have never seen any unusual delay joining a meeting. Warm startup for the application is about three seconds on a relatively old machine.
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      >Teams is set to automatically open and run in the background as soon as you start your device. If you close the app, it keeps running in the background. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-settings-in-teams-b506e8f1-1a96-4cf1-8c6b-b6ed4f424bc7 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-settings-i...
      - butlerm 5y ago
        Yes, and it still takes three seconds to warm start.
        GeekyBear 5y ago
        It's taking that long just to display the UI for a program already running in the background. An apples to apples comparison would require you to change the settings to disable autostart on Windows.
arecurrence 5y ago
I’ve seen it running gtpj locally (which needs 48GB ram so this is the first apple laptop that can run it). I didn’t check how many threads were at full tilt but possibly my entire cpu was maxed out. Still no perceptible fan noise :)
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > so this is the first apple laptop that can run it There were a few 16" MBP models that could be equipped with 64gb of memory, before the Apple silicon transition. Also worth noting, a lot of the older Intel chips also had memory capacities that went beyond 64 gigs. In theory Apple could have shipped a 128gb MBP.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Citrix client regularly beachballs and hangs for me. Obviously it’s buggy software, but isn’t buggy software often the cause for seeing the beach ball in general?

spacexsucks 5y ago

Yeah no. Depends on how you use it. I see the beach ball on my M1 every time I try to compile rust or haskell. This M1 fanboyism is tiring

pschastain 5y ago
Because only your experience matters
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  Just like only the fanboys experience matters?
  - pschastain 5y ago
    Please point out where I said that
threeseed 5y ago
That would imply you are trying to multi-task whilst compiling Rust/Haskell. Chances are it has nothing to do with M1 and everything to do with your SSD being overwhelmed.
- supernovae 5y ago
  that’s the thing with computers, performance is always nuanced… Latest Intel’s are fast, latest AMDs are fast, latest Apple silicon are fast and we’ve never really had it better. I’m super happy to be back in desktop arena with user replaceable parts and capacity.. 32 core, 128gb ram, non soc systems for me at prices i could only dream of a few years ago.
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  If your are using vscode with the rust analyzer plugin, you are constantly "compiling". This is how the inline hints, errors, typehints are done. My 3 year old i5 laptop struggled with this, my new desktop 12th gen i7 has the power so it never slows down, but if you look at the syst monitor, you can see that it does do quite some work. If you have this plus some of the other electron hogs (teams, slack, a browser with 30 tabs of stack overflow), your system does have a proper load.
- spacexsucks 5y ago
  Maybe but given that it is an apple machine things arent user replaceable.
addaon 5y ago
Compiling can use an arbitrarily large amount of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth. After all, if more of the critical resource were available, using it would allow compilation to complete faster, which would be a win. The beach ball occurs when some UI process does not service its event loop. This can be an issue with the process, or it can be caused because that process is contending for resources with the compilation processes. If the critical resource that's causing a beachball here is CPU, there's two very easy paths forward: either modify your compilation scripts to use fewer threads than the system has physical performance cores, or run the compilation at a higher nice level. In either case the UI process should be able to get CPU when it needs it and not beachball. The higher nice level is generally both the easier and more effective solution, since it will allow the compilation process to continue to use all cores when UI processes are not scheduled. If the critical resource is memory the system will page, which will turn the critical resource into disk bandwidth. Fixes specific to memory usage here are to get more memory (not really actionable), or to reduce parallelism on the build process. If the critical resource is disk bandwidth, this is the hardest problem to fix. To my knowledge MacOS doesn't provide good tools for managing disk priority. If the disk bandwidth being used is to access build-related files (source, object files, etc) rather than swap, one possibility is to use a thunderbolt-connected external SSD for the build artifacts, leaving the internal storage for swap and for the UI program. However, if your build process is using so many disk operations that it's starving a UI program, you're likely to see a performance hit going to a slower external SSD.
- sonofhans 5y ago
  Your comment is one reason I still love this place. A brief snarky comment is taken seriously in the best way with a well-considered and comprehensive reply. It’s like watching a Zen koan play out.
edflsafoiewq 5y ago
Rust and Haskell are infamously slow to compile.
benreesman 5y ago
Word of caution: many (most?) Linux distributions are vulnerable to various hard crashes with -j >= num_cores, and sometimes getting the physical machine or instance restarted is a pain! So you probably also want to fix these builds if you use any of this Rust or Haskell software on Linux. Also SpaceX doesn’t suck, you suck. :P
Tagbert 5y ago
But the real question is whether you ever saw the beach ball when doing these compiles on Intel processors? It is not that the M-series chips can never trigger a beachball but that there are significantly fewer scenarios where that happens to the point that many users never find themselves in those scenarios. You see their enthusiasm as fanboyism and they could see you as being grumpy, but the you are just both seeing different parts of a distribution curve.

ravenstine 5y ago

Oh you can definitely get the beach ball, but I pretty much only get it from things I would expect to get it from. If you're doing things that aren't graphically expensive, then yeah, the M1 means next to no weird hangups in my experience. I'd be surprised if you never got the beach ball.

grishka 5y ago
I do get it but only when an app is blocking its UI thread. The rest of the system is still responsive. On my old macbook I'd get a beachball and the entire system would freeze for seconds at a time.

listless 5y ago

Install Teams

cyberge99 5y ago
Teams is absolute garbage. Every single app on my MBMax opens instantly except for teams (and Affinity Photo, which I’d expect). It literally takes 15 seconds to join a meeting with one of the fastest user computers available. Absolutely horrible garbage of an app. Microsoft has zero incentive to fix it, because they have a captive audience i. Their enterprise customers.
- butlerm 5y ago
  It might have serious problems on the Mac. On Windows it is generally quite nice, and I have never seen any unusual delay joining a meeting. Warm startup for the application is about three seconds on a relatively old machine.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    >Teams is set to automatically open and run in the background as soon as you start your device. If you close the app, it keeps running in the background. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-settings-in-teams-b506e8f1-1a96-4cf1-8c6b-b6ed4f424bc7 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-settings-i...
    - butlerm 5y ago
      Yes, and it still takes three seconds to warm start.
      - GeekyBear 5y ago
        It's taking that long just to display the UI for a program already running in the background. An apples to apples comparison would require you to change the settings to disable autostart on Windows.

arecurrence 5y ago

I’ve seen it running gtpj locally (which needs 48GB ram so this is the first apple laptop that can run it). I didn’t check how many threads were at full tilt but possibly my entire cpu was maxed out. Still no perceptible fan noise :)

smoldesu 5y ago
> so this is the first apple laptop that can run it There were a few 16" MBP models that could be equipped with 64gb of memory, before the Apple silicon transition. Also worth noting, a lot of the older Intel chips also had memory capacities that went beyond 64 gigs. In theory Apple could have shipped a 128gb MBP.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Citrix client regularly beachballs and hangs for me. Obviously it’s buggy software, but isn’t buggy software often the cause for seeing the beach ball in general?