7 ms·

OT but does anyone else find their M1 Mac to have very bimodal performance? I have an M1 Macbook Pro (2020 model) and in general it's very fast. It's certainly

by habosa 4y ago

OT but does anyone else find their M1 Mac to have very bimodal performance? I have an M1 Macbook Pro (2020 model) and in general it's very fast. It's certainly the fastest web-browsing machine I've ever used. But when I overload it (dev servers running, Google Meet, Notion / Slack all up) it goes full spinning-beach-ball and sometimes takes minutes to recover. It seems like in particular it's much too eager to give 100% of all cores to something like "npm build" and doesn't leave enough power behind to run the UI. For example it's really common for my music to skip/jump when my code compiles, which is not something I'd expect on any modern computer. My Intel MacBooks before this and my Windows laptop never have these kinds of issues. They definitely got very slow at times, but never totally locked up.

surfmike 4y ago
How much memory do you have? I’ve definitely seen this a lot on my 8GB MacBook Air and it coincides with running out of memory. Open Activity Monitor and see if your machine is under memory pressure.
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  Have similar issues on my 16GB MBP 14 which stays pretty close to maxed out regularly. Sometimes I end up closing tabs or apps.
jcmontx 4y ago
Happens to me too. I bought this Mac last year and I wonder if it was the right choice. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it.
rjzzleep 4y ago
I've had absolutely the same experience. I've had to share my wife's laptop when I had water damage on mine and she generally keeps all mail and calendar in chrome instead of using the native apps for some, to me, inexplicable reason and so my user would then do that frequently. Compilations would be lightning fast, but otherwise it feels exactly like you describe it.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I use web apps. I'm using multiple systems over the course of a day and I like just having a uniform environment across them.
manicdee 4y ago
I found “grep” on a 10GB text file on an external USB-C SSD will cause that stuttering behaviour.
d_sc 4y ago
This is pretty minor. The area I have noticed a real performance difference between Intel and Apple silicon is the macOS activity monitor. On Intel machines it populates immediately when you switch between cpu/memory/energy. On m1 machines there’s a noticeable lag. Like I said, it’s pretty minor but when I’m going into activity monitor it’s to check a process and the performance delay feels bigger than it actually is.
- janekm 4y ago
  I doubt that's anything to do with the CPU... on my Intel MacBook Pro the Activity Monitor also lags about 5s before showing the stats.
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    That's because it only polls every 5 seconds by default. You can reduce that to 1 or 2 seconds in View > Update Frequency on the menubar.
Nursie 4y ago
Weird.... I've done a bunch of stuff with my 16GB M1 Air - processor intensive java unit test runs taking ten minutes each, for instance, while also using microsoft teams and slack at the same time - and carried on using the machine as normal in between. I don't think I've ever seen the beach ball...
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Haven’t seen that on my work-provided 32GB 16” M1 Pro MBP running iOS dev, Android dev, and once in a blue moon web dev workloads. Maybe the extra cores compared to regular M1 are enough to dodge the issue in most circumstances. In general I would say that beachballs long enough to really notice are more frequent on my personal base spec iMac Pro.
teki_one 4y ago
When I overloaded my Intel Mac it did the same thing. MacOS is just not that great under pressure. Bluetooth regularly dropped out even with just one build running, when I started 2 at the same time (iOS+Android) there was always a chance for a reboot. (64GB ram+i9 cpu) Had an M1 Mac Mini with 8GB ram for Lightroom+Chrome use, it did not cut it. 16" MBPro with 16GB ram is heaps better, but no developer experience on that machine. I think buying as much memory as you can afford is a good advice for Mac buyers. 8GB is enough for Chrome + a few native apps, but would go for 16GB for anything more and now you can get 24GB with the M2, that is nice (like a 20GB machine + a 4GB GPU).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  There are many people that say that OSX doesn't have memory pressure and that Linux vm suffers so horribly in comparison. I have seen the same behavior as you describe. I find that almost any system fails under memory pressure, they just fail differnetly.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    I think it is mostly people comparing iOS with android and assuming the same situation applies to desktop operating systems as well.
  - nowahe 4y ago
    On macos, whenever I have a high memory pressure, coupled to a large swap usage, I find that the system becomes really sensitive to I/O intensive tasks. If I start an IO intensive task (eg a recursive grep or a backup), any task that involves pulling data from the swap (eg switching desktops) gets significantly slower, and I often see the dreaded beach ball
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - 4y ago
nowahe 4y ago
I've never pushed it enough for it to completely lock up, but I've had some weird bugs/crash happen to me. Like all webviews crashing at the same time (all electron apps + all browsers), with an impossibility to run anything (commands would hang, trying to open apps didn't do anything, etc). But what was uncanny was that the UI would happily run smoothly at 120hz, with all the menus still working and being responsive. However I've had a lot of issues with WindowServer. I have an external 4k display connected to my mac (Macbook Pro 2021 14"), which I usually scale down to 3200x1800 HiDPI. And 2-3 days after a fresh boot, I'll start to have issues such as the WindowServer process jumping to around 140-180% CPU, and staying there until I reboot (or restart the process). I'll also randomly have my cursor start "glitching" and jump around in a 20px radius around the place I want to point; but only on my external screen. My feeling is that it has something to do with the non-integer scaling I'm doing , and WindowServer entering at some point a state which introduces rounding errors (which would explain the glitching cursor) or something like that. Also, switching resolutions (or even refresh rate) of the external display will temporarily fix the cursor glitching issue. But my biggest complain, by far, is that there is virtually zero way for me to troubleshoot/debug the problem. As far as I can tell, there is no way for a debugger to attach itself to the WindowServer process, no documentation on internal workings of the rendering pipeline, virtually no logs, etc. I've been trying to narrow down those issues for 6-8 months, and I've stilled not been able to track it down
- ianai 4y ago
  Have you tried sticking to the default scale (1:1) for a couple days or other whole integers of scaling? I’ve seen mine come to a crawl when trying to playback 4k video sometimes. Generally ok with HD.
  - nowahe 4y ago
    I've tried, but for me limiting myself to the default/whole integer scaling is more of a pain than the bugs I encounter with it. With 4k, at 1:1 I basically have two choices of resolution : either 3840x2160 native (which results in tiny text, even on a 32") or 1920x1080 HiDPI (which is way too small of an effective resolution, especially at 32"). With 1:1.5 scaling, I can get 2560x1440p HiDPI, which seems to be more stable (and renders text more crisply), but still a tad too small for what I need. A 5k display would fix those issues, but the price difference between 4k & 5k is way too steep to me for the marginal improvement I would get out of it. However, I've never had an issue with 4k video playback, even on non integer scaled resolutions. What's more, they virtually never drop frames, even with the system under load. My bet is that their hardware video decoding pipeline is significantly better that what's present on Intel CPUs, and is able to better delegate video decoding to the hardware decoders.
have_faith 4y ago
I'm using the M1 Pro all day, never noticed it struggle with anything.
e-clinton 4y ago
I’ve seen this with my M1 and M1 Pro machines. I think the biggest culprit is the RAM. 16 just isn’t enough for large workloads no matter how much faster disk IO is. Usually killing off whatever is taking the most RAM gets the machine working well again.
- Aaargh20318 4y ago
  It might indeed be the RAM. I've never seen this behaviour on my M1 Max with 64GB.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Classic swap fail. A good rule of thumb is that when a swapping OS runs out of RAM it literally cannot swap its way back to stability unless you kill some of the tasks. Faster drives help a little, but the most practical option is to have enough RAM to use no swap at all. I have a 64GB Mac and I'm regularly over 32GB. If I only had 32GB my ten core Mac would still grind to a halt.
    - thebean11 4y ago
      The RAM usage on Mac is a little misleading I think. If you have lots of free RAM it will aggressively start caching stuff that could easily be offloaded if memory pressure were to increase.
      - solarkraft 4y ago
        That's why they promote memory pressure as a metric. Generally bad things start to happen once the graph goes into the red.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Swap helps for some use cases - the most common one being having two large programs, but only using one at a time. Imagine having Photoshop and Illustrator both open, both using 6GB of RAM on an 8GB machine - if you're only using Photoshop then the OS can swap out Illustrator's RAM to make room - but if you're actively using both that won't work.
tomcam 4y ago
I get that with my M1 iMac
jwilliams 4y ago
Very likely this is RAM-related. The M1s cope very well (particularly with memory compression). However, get a set of electron-based apps in there (Notion and Slack from your list)... and seems to struggle.
skohan 4y ago
I've never had this issue. I'm on an M1 air, and generally it doesn't break a sweat even when I have a ton of demanding things running. The only exception is when I'm running one of my own computer graphics projects, and I accidentally try to allocate frame-buffers which are an order of magnitude or so too large. Even then it's only locked up for a few seconds. I would imagine there is some specific issue which is causing this failure for you. Maybe a bug in some software, or a hardware failure of some kind.
rozenmd 4y ago
Watch your memory pressure in Activity Monitor. Mine's typically orange/green during web dev and works fine, but if I open too many electron apps it'll go red and the laptop grinds to a halt.
gcoguiec 4y ago
I've experienced severe slowdowns with any 16GB models. That's why I systematically max out the memory on my Macs now (64/128GB). Come at a premium, but the peace of mind of not having to care about memory usage is worth it tenfold.
SirHound 4y ago
I’ve been using last years Pro and even during light video editing, compiling code etc its never missed a beat, never spun the fans. I’ve been blown away tbh (but not by the fans)
concinds 4y ago
I have the same issue Try opening 25+ tabs in Chrome, and the whole system will slow to a crawl (with a measly ~3GB swap if you have 8GB RAM). Safari doesn't seem to have this issue. Force Chrome to aggressively suspend tabs, and the issue goes away. The slowdown also happens to me when running lots of Electron apps, and consistently happens around 3GB swap (strange, considering how small 3GB is, and how fast the storage is on M1 Macs). Might be a bug in Electron, in Chrome, or in how macOS manages memory (this 100% survives across reinstalls with minimal apps installed). Regardless, I hope Apple is looking into it, and tries to address it either with a macOS update or by working with Google et al.
- concinds 4y ago
  I take it back. Safari definitely does the same thing when you get to 3GB of swap. What's worse is that Apple has a pathological aversion to transparency and just can't admit this is a known issue and that a fix is coming, so we can only assume they don't know about this (this issue has existed for at least 2 years now).
npc12345 4y ago
8 or 16 ram?
leetcrew 4y ago
fwiw, I've also experienced this on windows if I allowed msvc to use 8/8 threads. the cursor wouldn't even move smoothly. the solution at the time was to lower the compilation thread priority below whatever the default was.
bedast 4y ago
The only time I've managed to overload my M1 Pro Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM is when I overprovisioned on RAM and caused excessive amounts of swapping to occur. Keeping my resources under control, I can run upwards to simulated 10 node data clusters with loads and extracts running, among other activity, and be able to do other things while that runs in the background. Keeping resources under control is going to be paramount to any system, let alone something not designed for this kind of workload. Even when I let resource usage go a bit out of control I've never had it lock up. Early on, I had USB related system crashes, but those went away as updates were released.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  My 2020 intel MacBook can barely run docker, an express/grapnel backend and a react frontend. I tried adding live share on top of this and it crashed the laptop. My 2021 M1 Mac mini can do all of that while live sharing my entire dev setup, running video chat, etc.
zionic 4y ago
I haven't had issues like that, but usually it's Xcode doing the "use all cores" thing so I suspect they're properly assigning QoS. I did find that if I switch power on my desk fan _and_ my USB-C hub is plugged in there's a ~10% chance of a kernel-panic and reboot.
zasdffaa 4y ago
Just task switching on a CPU should not possibly be able to do that, so sounds like it's thrashing[1], would kind of fit except that with SSDs it should recover much faster than HDD. But I'd certainly put it more on IO than cpu. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)
gnicholas 4y ago
I’ve been wondering how much RAM to order on my MBA. I’m not a dev, but I do like to have many tabs open in Brave. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want performance bottlenecks. How much would folks recommend for heavy but nontechnical use? In case it matters, I’d be plugged to a 1080 display, so not a huge draw from the graphics side of things.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  8GB with a 4K display connected was definitely not enough for me, but I also have a ton of tabs and a lot of stuff running at the same time. This kind of use seems much better with 16GB. You may be able to get away with 8GB, but 16 may still be worth it for you.
closeparen 4y ago
Thermal throttling?
solarkraft 4y ago
Yes, absolutely, I've never seen this talked about before, so I'm happy to read it here. I also experience MASSIVE audio crackling and insane lags. I think it's related to memory pressure (high swapping) since it seems to happen once the graph goes into the red. I switched from a 8GB Pro to a 16GB Air and am much happier with the function keys and the increased RAM.
- pram 4y ago
  It's memory for sure. My art program easily gets to 100GB+ usage (on a 64GB MBP) and whenever I do a large scale the rest of the system goes to shit, especially audio.
gnicholas 4y ago
My Intel Mac (2017 base MBP) actually quits applications when RAM usage is too high. There's no warning, and no notice that it's happened. They just quit. And this is despite plenty of swap space. It's mind-boggling.
stetrain 4y ago
That really sounds like hitting a RAM wall. My M1 Air 8GB is great for everyday tasks but if I start running heavy IDEs etc. and start hitting memory pressure it acts like you describe.
k3liutZu 4y ago
My Intel MacBook Pro skips music and drops bluetooth packets during heavy workloads.
NegativeLatency 4y ago
What are your ram usage stats like?
habosa 4y ago
Sounds like this is just a memory issue which makes sense because it does only happen when I let too much memory pressure / swap build up. I only have 8GB, Apple should have never sold a Pro model with that little RAM. Still, I feel like the failure mode for low memory is different on M1. This isn’t my first underpowered machine but it’s definitely the one that stutters the hardest.

by habosa 4y ago

surfmike 4y ago

How much memory do you have? I’ve definitely seen this a lot on my 8GB MacBook Air and it coincides with running out of memory. Open Activity Monitor and see if your machine is under memory pressure.

artificialLimbs 4y ago
Have similar issues on my 16GB MBP 14 which stays pretty close to maxed out regularly. Sometimes I end up closing tabs or apps.

jcmontx 4y ago

Happens to me too. I bought this Mac last year and I wonder if it was the right choice. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it.

rjzzleep 4y ago

I've had absolutely the same experience. I've had to share my wife's laptop when I had water damage on mine and she generally keeps all mail and calendar in chrome instead of using the native apps for some, to me, inexplicable reason and so my user would then do that frequently. Compilations would be lightning fast, but otherwise it feels exactly like you describe it.

ghaff 4y ago
I use web apps. I'm using multiple systems over the course of a day and I like just having a uniform environment across them.

manicdee 4y ago

I found “grep” on a 10GB text file on an external USB-C SSD will cause that stuttering behaviour.

d_sc 4y ago

This is pretty minor. The area I have noticed a real performance difference between Intel and Apple silicon is the macOS activity monitor. On Intel machines it populates immediately when you switch between cpu/memory/energy. On m1 machines there’s a noticeable lag. Like I said, it’s pretty minor but when I’m going into activity monitor it’s to check a process and the performance delay feels bigger than it actually is.

janekm 4y ago
I doubt that's anything to do with the CPU... on my Intel MacBook Pro the Activity Monitor also lags about 5s before showing the stats.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  That's because it only polls every 5 seconds by default. You can reduce that to 1 or 2 seconds in View > Update Frequency on the menubar.

Nursie 4y ago

Weird.... I've done a bunch of stuff with my 16GB M1 Air - processor intensive java unit test runs taking ten minutes each, for instance, while also using microsoft teams and slack at the same time - and carried on using the machine as normal in between. I don't think I've ever seen the beach ball...

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Haven’t seen that on my work-provided 32GB 16” M1 Pro MBP running iOS dev, Android dev, and once in a blue moon web dev workloads. Maybe the extra cores compared to regular M1 are enough to dodge the issue in most circumstances. In general I would say that beachballs long enough to really notice are more frequent on my personal base spec iMac Pro.

teki_one 4y ago

When I overloaded my Intel Mac it did the same thing. MacOS is just not that great under pressure. Bluetooth regularly dropped out even with just one build running, when I started 2 at the same time (iOS+Android) there was always a chance for a reboot. (64GB ram+i9 cpu) Had an M1 Mac Mini with 8GB ram for Lightroom+Chrome use, it did not cut it. 16" MBPro with 16GB ram is heaps better, but no developer experience on that machine. I think buying as much memory as you can afford is a good advice for Mac buyers. 8GB is enough for Chrome + a few native apps, but would go for 16GB for anything more and now you can get 24GB with the M2, that is nice (like a 20GB machine + a 4GB GPU).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ungamedplayer 4y ago
There are many people that say that OSX doesn't have memory pressure and that Linux vm suffers so horribly in comparison. I have seen the same behavior as you describe. I find that almost any system fails under memory pressure, they just fail differnetly.
- tjoff 4y ago
  I think it is mostly people comparing iOS with android and assuming the same situation applies to desktop operating systems as well.
- nowahe 4y ago
  On macos, whenever I have a high memory pressure, coupled to a large swap usage, I find that the system becomes really sensitive to I/O intensive tasks. If I start an IO intensive task (eg a recursive grep or a backup), any task that involves pulling data from the swap (eg switching desktops) gets significantly slower, and I often see the dreaded beach ball
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 4y ago

nowahe 4y ago

I've never pushed it enough for it to completely lock up, but I've had some weird bugs/crash happen to me. Like all webviews crashing at the same time (all electron apps + all browsers), with an impossibility to run anything (commands would hang, trying to open apps didn't do anything, etc). But what was uncanny was that the UI would happily run smoothly at 120hz, with all the menus still working and being responsive. However I've had a lot of issues with WindowServer. I have an external 4k display connected to my mac (Macbook Pro 2021 14"), which I usually scale down to 3200x1800 HiDPI. And 2-3 days after a fresh boot, I'll start to have issues such as the WindowServer process jumping to around 140-180% CPU, and staying there until I reboot (or restart the process). I'll also randomly have my cursor start "glitching" and jump around in a 20px radius around the place I want to point; but only on my external screen. My feeling is that it has something to do with the non-integer scaling I'm doing , and WindowServer entering at some point a state which introduces rounding errors (which would explain the glitching cursor) or something like that. Also, switching resolutions (or even refresh rate) of the external display will temporarily fix the cursor glitching issue. But my biggest complain, by far, is that there is virtually zero way for me to troubleshoot/debug the problem. As far as I can tell, there is no way for a debugger to attach itself to the WindowServer process, no documentation on internal workings of the rendering pipeline, virtually no logs, etc. I've been trying to narrow down those issues for 6-8 months, and I've stilled not been able to track it down

ianai 4y ago
Have you tried sticking to the default scale (1:1) for a couple days or other whole integers of scaling? I’ve seen mine come to a crawl when trying to playback 4k video sometimes. Generally ok with HD.
- nowahe 4y ago
  I've tried, but for me limiting myself to the default/whole integer scaling is more of a pain than the bugs I encounter with it. With 4k, at 1:1 I basically have two choices of resolution : either 3840x2160 native (which results in tiny text, even on a 32") or 1920x1080 HiDPI (which is way too small of an effective resolution, especially at 32"). With 1:1.5 scaling, I can get 2560x1440p HiDPI, which seems to be more stable (and renders text more crisply), but still a tad too small for what I need. A 5k display would fix those issues, but the price difference between 4k & 5k is way too steep to me for the marginal improvement I would get out of it. However, I've never had an issue with 4k video playback, even on non integer scaled resolutions. What's more, they virtually never drop frames, even with the system under load. My bet is that their hardware video decoding pipeline is significantly better that what's present on Intel CPUs, and is able to better delegate video decoding to the hardware decoders.

have_faith 4y ago

I'm using the M1 Pro all day, never noticed it struggle with anything.

e-clinton 4y ago

I’ve seen this with my M1 and M1 Pro machines. I think the biggest culprit is the RAM. 16 just isn’t enough for large workloads no matter how much faster disk IO is. Usually killing off whatever is taking the most RAM gets the machine working well again.

Aaargh20318 4y ago
It might indeed be the RAM. I've never seen this behaviour on my M1 Max with 64GB.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Classic swap fail. A good rule of thumb is that when a swapping OS runs out of RAM it literally cannot swap its way back to stability unless you kill some of the tasks. Faster drives help a little, but the most practical option is to have enough RAM to use no swap at all. I have a 64GB Mac and I'm regularly over 32GB. If I only had 32GB my ten core Mac would still grind to a halt.
  - thebean11 4y ago
    The RAM usage on Mac is a little misleading I think. If you have lots of free RAM it will aggressively start caching stuff that could easily be offloaded if memory pressure were to increase.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      That's why they promote memory pressure as a metric. Generally bad things start to happen once the graph goes into the red.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Swap helps for some use cases - the most common one being having two large programs, but only using one at a time. Imagine having Photoshop and Illustrator both open, both using 6GB of RAM on an 8GB machine - if you're only using Photoshop then the OS can swap out Illustrator's RAM to make room - but if you're actively using both that won't work.

tomcam 4y ago

I get that with my M1 iMac

jwilliams 4y ago

Very likely this is RAM-related. The M1s cope very well (particularly with memory compression). However, get a set of electron-based apps in there (Notion and Slack from your list)... and seems to struggle.

skohan 4y ago

I've never had this issue. I'm on an M1 air, and generally it doesn't break a sweat even when I have a ton of demanding things running. The only exception is when I'm running one of my own computer graphics projects, and I accidentally try to allocate frame-buffers which are an order of magnitude or so too large. Even then it's only locked up for a few seconds. I would imagine there is some specific issue which is causing this failure for you. Maybe a bug in some software, or a hardware failure of some kind.

rozenmd 4y ago

Watch your memory pressure in Activity Monitor. Mine's typically orange/green during web dev and works fine, but if I open too many electron apps it'll go red and the laptop grinds to a halt.

gcoguiec 4y ago

I've experienced severe slowdowns with any 16GB models. That's why I systematically max out the memory on my Macs now (64/128GB). Come at a premium, but the peace of mind of not having to care about memory usage is worth it tenfold.

SirHound 4y ago

I’ve been using last years Pro and even during light video editing, compiling code etc its never missed a beat, never spun the fans. I’ve been blown away tbh (but not by the fans)

concinds 4y ago

I have the same issue Try opening 25+ tabs in Chrome, and the whole system will slow to a crawl (with a measly ~3GB swap if you have 8GB RAM). Safari doesn't seem to have this issue. Force Chrome to aggressively suspend tabs, and the issue goes away. The slowdown also happens to me when running lots of Electron apps, and consistently happens around 3GB swap (strange, considering how small 3GB is, and how fast the storage is on M1 Macs). Might be a bug in Electron, in Chrome, or in how macOS manages memory (this 100% survives across reinstalls with minimal apps installed). Regardless, I hope Apple is looking into it, and tries to address it either with a macOS update or by working with Google et al.

concinds 4y ago
I take it back. Safari definitely does the same thing when you get to 3GB of swap. What's worse is that Apple has a pathological aversion to transparency and just can't admit this is a known issue and that a fix is coming, so we can only assume they don't know about this (this issue has existed for at least 2 years now).

npc12345 4y ago

8 or 16 ram?

leetcrew 4y ago

fwiw, I've also experienced this on windows if I allowed msvc to use 8/8 threads. the cursor wouldn't even move smoothly. the solution at the time was to lower the compilation thread priority below whatever the default was.

bedast 4y ago

The only time I've managed to overload my M1 Pro Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM is when I overprovisioned on RAM and caused excessive amounts of swapping to occur. Keeping my resources under control, I can run upwards to simulated 10 node data clusters with loads and extracts running, among other activity, and be able to do other things while that runs in the background. Keeping resources under control is going to be paramount to any system, let alone something not designed for this kind of workload. Even when I let resource usage go a bit out of control I've never had it lock up. Early on, I had USB related system crashes, but those went away as updates were released.

edgyquant 4y ago
My 2020 intel MacBook can barely run docker, an express/grapnel backend and a react frontend. I tried adding live share on top of this and it crashed the laptop. My 2021 M1 Mac mini can do all of that while live sharing my entire dev setup, running video chat, etc.

zionic 4y ago

I haven't had issues like that, but usually it's Xcode doing the "use all cores" thing so I suspect they're properly assigning QoS. I did find that if I switch power on my desk fan _and_ my USB-C hub is plugged in there's a ~10% chance of a kernel-panic and reboot.

zasdffaa 4y ago

Just task switching on a CPU should not possibly be able to do that, so sounds like it's thrashing[1], would kind of fit except that with SSDs it should recover much faster than HDD. But I'd certainly put it more on IO than cpu. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)

gnicholas 4y ago

I’ve been wondering how much RAM to order on my MBA. I’m not a dev, but I do like to have many tabs open in Brave. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want performance bottlenecks. How much would folks recommend for heavy but nontechnical use? In case it matters, I’d be plugged to a 1080 display, so not a huge draw from the graphics side of things.

solarkraft 4y ago
8GB with a 4K display connected was definitely not enough for me, but I also have a ton of tabs and a lot of stuff running at the same time. This kind of use seems much better with 16GB. You may be able to get away with 8GB, but 16 may still be worth it for you.

closeparen 4y ago

Thermal throttling?

solarkraft 4y ago

Yes, absolutely, I've never seen this talked about before, so I'm happy to read it here. I also experience MASSIVE audio crackling and insane lags. I think it's related to memory pressure (high swapping) since it seems to happen once the graph goes into the red. I switched from a 8GB Pro to a 16GB Air and am much happier with the function keys and the increased RAM.

pram 4y ago
It's memory for sure. My art program easily gets to 100GB+ usage (on a 64GB MBP) and whenever I do a large scale the rest of the system goes to shit, especially audio.

gnicholas 4y ago

My Intel Mac (2017 base MBP) actually quits applications when RAM usage is too high. There's no warning, and no notice that it's happened. They just quit. And this is despite plenty of swap space. It's mind-boggling.

stetrain 4y ago

That really sounds like hitting a RAM wall. My M1 Air 8GB is great for everyday tasks but if I start running heavy IDEs etc. and start hitting memory pressure it acts like you describe.

k3liutZu 4y ago

My Intel MacBook Pro skips music and drops bluetooth packets during heavy workloads.

NegativeLatency 4y ago

What are your ram usage stats like?

habosa 4y ago

Sounds like this is just a memory issue which makes sense because it does only happen when I let too much memory pressure / swap build up. I only have 8GB, Apple should have never sold a Pro model with that little RAM. Still, I feel like the failure mode for low memory is different on M1. This isn’t my first underpowered machine but it’s definitely the one that stutters the hardest.