3 ms·

> For the life of me, I can not figure out how the 8GB models work for Apple. Swap was intended as a last resort for avoiding OOM errors: dump to the slower me

by thefz 3y ago

> For the life of me, I can not figure out how the 8GB models work for Apple. Swap was intended as a last resort for avoiding OOM errors: dump to the slower media instead of terminating open programs. Apple has seen a profit two fronts here: upselling the 16GB (which is baseline) model, and forcing 8GB users to upgrade after some years as their ssd will be destroyed or end of life due to the daily continuous writes.

giantrobot 3y ago
Apple has supported compressed memory pages for almost a decade now. It compresses pages before it writes pages to swap (iOS doesn't even have swap). The cost to compress pages is an order of magnitude better than writing to disk including SSDs. Compressed pages aren't magic but they let 8GB go further than you might expect.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  Windows has memory compression for years too. Doesn't make low memory hardware usable.
  - lproven 3y ago
    > Windows has memory compression for years too. You're right. > Doesn't make low memory hardware usable. You're wrong. It _really_ helps.
- benterix 3y ago
  Compressed pages are not unique to Apple and are used by Windows and Linux, too.
  - lproven 3y ago
    On by default in Windows 10. Not enabled by default in any Linux I have ever seen, and for context, in the last two years I've reviewed about 50 different distros. And I do mean entire distros, not just desktops.
- lproven 3y ago
  Indeed; it was one of the significant changes in Mavericks (10.9): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mavericks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mavericks It's an option in Linux; put `zswap.enable=1` in the kernel parameters. I do this routinely now, because I like old Thinkpads and a few of mine only have 8GB RAM. It's not transformational but the difference in performance is really noticeable: open a few big fat bloated memory-hungry apps, like anything using Electron, and wow, suddenly your machine stays responsive under load.
karmakaze 3y ago
Looking at this in a positive light, maybe Apple is rolling back the clock. As one comment said: > The only time I hit problems was when I put Adobe near it with Lightroom and Slack. When stuff runs poorly, users won't blame the system: only the programs that run badly. Apple is good at making native apps which they do anyway and they'll run much better than anything in Electron, or even other portable software tech. There will be pressure for other software vendors to up (or reduce) their game.
- seec 3y ago
  Current Apple software is not particularly good and hardly competitive in functionality with alternatives. That's before running into network effects. If we have to look at the Apple Music client, it's much worse than Spotify, funny that they achieved that... And try to make big Numbers spreadsheets for the lols; it's really not hard to see why everyone is using Excel even though it's uglier and more complicated to get results that look good. At the end of the day, looks don't make the work, but slow crashing software do make the work much harder... The truth is that Apple became greedier they also pulled out investment EVERYWHERE, including their own software. They only do stuff if they think they can make billions out of them nowadays. Most of the interesting stuff are leftovers from the Jobs era.

by thefz 3y ago

giantrobot 3y ago

Apple has supported compressed memory pages for almost a decade now. It compresses pages before it writes pages to swap (iOS doesn't even have swap). The cost to compress pages is an order of magnitude better than writing to disk including SSDs. Compressed pages aren't magic but they let 8GB go further than you might expect.

Yizahi 3y ago
Windows has memory compression for years too. Doesn't make low memory hardware usable.
- lproven 3y ago
  > Windows has memory compression for years too. You're right. > Doesn't make low memory hardware usable. You're wrong. It _really_ helps.
benterix 3y ago
Compressed pages are not unique to Apple and are used by Windows and Linux, too.
- lproven 3y ago
  On by default in Windows 10. Not enabled by default in any Linux I have ever seen, and for context, in the last two years I've reviewed about 50 different distros. And I do mean entire distros, not just desktops.
lproven 3y ago
Indeed; it was one of the significant changes in Mavericks (10.9): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mavericks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mavericks It's an option in Linux; put `zswap.enable=1` in the kernel parameters. I do this routinely now, because I like old Thinkpads and a few of mine only have 8GB RAM. It's not transformational but the difference in performance is really noticeable: open a few big fat bloated memory-hungry apps, like anything using Electron, and wow, suddenly your machine stays responsive under load.

karmakaze 3y ago

Looking at this in a positive light, maybe Apple is rolling back the clock. As one comment said: > The only time I hit problems was when I put Adobe near it with Lightroom and Slack. When stuff runs poorly, users won't blame the system: only the programs that run badly. Apple is good at making native apps which they do anyway and they'll run much better than anything in Electron, or even other portable software tech. There will be pressure for other software vendors to up (or reduce) their game.

seec 3y ago
Current Apple software is not particularly good and hardly competitive in functionality with alternatives. That's before running into network effects. If we have to look at the Apple Music client, it's much worse than Spotify, funny that they achieved that... And try to make big Numbers spreadsheets for the lols; it's really not hard to see why everyone is using Excel even though it's uglier and more complicated to get results that look good. At the end of the day, looks don't make the work, but slow crashing software do make the work much harder... The truth is that Apple became greedier they also pulled out investment EVERYWHERE, including their own software. They only do stuff if they think they can make billions out of them nowadays. Most of the interesting stuff are leftovers from the Jobs era.