5 ms·

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 4y ago
Because only your experience matters
- spacexsucks 4y ago
  Just like only the fanboys experience matters?
  - pschastain 4y ago
    Please point out where I said that
threeseed 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Maybe but given that it is an apple machine things arent user replaceable.
addaon 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Rust and Haskell are infamously slow to compile.
benreesman 4y 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 4y 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.

pschastain 4y ago

Because only your experience matters

spacexsucks 4y ago
Just like only the fanboys experience matters?
- pschastain 4y ago
  Please point out where I said that

threeseed 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
Maybe but given that it is an apple machine things arent user replaceable.

addaon 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago

Rust and Haskell are infamously slow to compile.

benreesman 4y 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 4y 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.