6 ms·

I have an M2 for my work. MacOS still gives me random lag spikes sometimes. But it's probably because the OS is bad and not the hardware. This is never an issue

by ki_ 3y ago

I have an M2 for my work. MacOS still gives me random lag spikes sometimes. But it's probably because the OS is bad and not the hardware. This is never an issue on win/linux. idk. im not a fan. but.. im just saying.. if the hardware is so superior, why does it feel so inferior? Like.. my $500 linux laptop feels smoother and faster (GUI wise)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mschuster91 3y ago
> I have an M2 for my work. MacOS still gives me random lag spikes sometimes. You're most likely running low on RAM and the machine is swapping. Check in Activity Monitor what's going on.
crimsontech 3y ago
I’ve had a few corporate MacBooks sent to me by clients for security testing and they always seem much slower than my own. It’s normally down to security tooling they install on them.
- charrondev 3y ago
  This 100%. My personal MacBook Pro (m1 pro) feels (and benchmarks) far faster than my work M1 Max which has cylance and Jamf on it. Recently it has had a cpu core dedicated to `find / -iname log4j-core*` which has a very unreasonable impact on everything else on the machine.
  - eurekin 3y ago
    oh wow! I've cought that system wide find on a few occasions and thought it was related to the specific of my employer. AFAIRC, it was scanning for vulnerable log4j versions
  - ctur 3y ago
    Careful, your homedir has a CloudStorage folder and if you are using, say, Dropbox or Google Drive then that find will be incredibly slow (in addition to security software possibly slowing it down).
  - camel_gopher 3y ago
    Okta verify is another resource intensive agent. 1-5% cpu to continuously stat a client side cert.
    - orf 3y ago
      Can you elaborate?!
- emmet 3y ago
  That's exactly what it is. Even an olympic sprinter is slow with two broken legs.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I feel a little conflicted about this. On the one hand, a lot of security software is poorly written, eats resources like it's Chrome, and introduces all kinds of microstutters through (exclusive) locks all over the place. On the other hand, many operating systems don't provide a (reliable) API to design decent security software against. Log collection is all over the place, even on Windows, which traditionally had Event Log as a well concentrated logging destination. There's no way to write good security software for an operating system that's written without security software in mind. If I were handling important secrets, I wouldn't want a fleet of machines out there with just the basic antivirus that came preinstalled with the OS (if it came with one at all). On the other hand, so many pieces of "enterprise" security management are absolutely terrible, and require one (or more) full-time employee(s) to constantly configure them, communicate with users, and solve problems, just to keep software in check. I think both operating systems and security management software need to listen to each other, and change. Operating systems need to be written with security stuff in mind, and security software needs to focus on a good user experience rather collecting than shiny buzzwords to sell to management.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Operating systems need to be written with security stuff in mind, and security software needs to focus on a good user experience rather collecting than shiny buzzwords to sell to management. They won't because by the time the users get fed the "food" the contract is long since signed and valid for a few years, and the competition isn't better so even if management could be arsed to vote with their wallet, they couldn't. Is there an actual term for "the entire industry is bullshit, but can get away with it because the cost to entry is so high that new, less bullshit competitors can't even enter the industry"?
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    > There's no way to write good security software for an operating system that's written without security software in mind. That's the job of the OS vendor: to design software such that third-party security theatre isn't necessary.
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Yeah. At my previous job we had all kinds of JAMF management software and Crowdstrike (??) and it was a massive performance killer. Particularly, it seemed to be configured to scan every file on disk access, which was a performance nightmare for things like that involved "accessing lots of files" like Git on our large repo. Spotlight indexing seemed to cause some pretty big random lag spikes as well.
HumanOstrich 3y ago
Do you work for a big corporation? They tend to install a ton of spyware on work machines they issue. Lots of flakey security and monitoring software with overlapping functionality.
colingoodman 3y ago
I don't experience any such lag spikes even when I have a lot running. Are you using a Macbook Air?
- sdflhasjd 3y ago
  I get this on my Mac Studio when I do anything CPU-intensive, the UI becomes jittery. macOS on M CPUs seems to be particularly sensitive to this because I can push a Ryzen much harder and not notice anything in Windows.
  - treprinum 3y ago
    Windows XP used to have that issue until they released some patch that prioritized UI when CPU was under stress. Linux had the same issue some time ago as well. I guess Apple will need to do something similar...
solarkraft 3y ago
Same - I've used multiple ARM Macs and they just freeze up for seconds sometimes. At this point I'm pretty sure its related to their swapping behavior.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  The OS really has zero hesitation to swap to sometimes insane amounts and by the time you feel it in the UI responsiveness you might already be swapping 10-20GB. 8GB is just too little for the base model. From what I've seen the OS alone will use 20-50% of that, and if I do anything productive with a couple applications and browser tabs I'm soon at 100% memory usage. Which can cause lags or short freezes when switching between applications. But on 16GB it's a very different experience, it gives decent breathing room. I think Apple really shot themselves in the foot with this, anyone using even half the CPU's potential is guaranteed to have significantly degraded performance and a worse experience.
carlmr 3y ago
>Like.. my $500 linux laptop feels smoother and faster (GUI wise) Which Linux do you use? We've had fast enough machines for fast and smooth GUI rendering for decades now. It's just that most software isn't optimized any farther than a few years back. Linux tends to be quite good on resource consumption. I can still run smooth and fast Linux on my 15 year old laptop. I can't do the same with Windows.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  IME, Intel’s Clear Linux is unbelievably good. Most people never give it a chance, but it runs great on core i3 from 2017 with just 8GB of RAM… and this is an OS that uses containers for almost everything. Just wonderful work by Intel’s team and contributors.
crimbles 3y ago
Not an issue for me even on my bottom end M2 mini.
Angostura 3y ago
When you say lag spikes what kind of thing are you talking about? I have an M1 iMac I run pretty’s hard and I’m not sure what kind of behaviour you’re seeing. Anything weird showing in Activity Monitor or Console?
- foobar1962 3y ago
  If it refers to random beach balls for 30 seconds when accessing disk ether directly or through apps... yeah I get that. I found it disappointing, a flaw in an otherwise great machine (M1 Mac mini).
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Network disk drives, like SMB, are a finder killer. Have been forever. It’s like they have an exclusive lock over finder GUI updates/events. It’s sad but it’s true.
  - Angostura 3y ago
    I probably see a beach ball once every 6 months. But I have 16GB RAM.
    - foobar1962 3y ago
      I have 16BG too. I have a Time Machine backup set up for a disk plugged into an AirPort Extreme, could that be the issue? (The machine connected to the network using WiFi if that matters.)
JohnBooty 3y ago
What security and management crap does your workplace mandate/preinstall, if any? My personal Macs with none of that crap perform extremely well, but that third-party security crap can be a massive killer.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
al_borland 3y ago
Is this a work laptop at a large corporation? I’ve found things my company installs can bring any system to its knees. The M1 was the first time my fans didn’t kick on randomly due to some background process, which has been nice. Windows or macOS, they found ways to screw up both. I’m sure they’d do it to Linux too, if it was supported.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rsynnott 3y ago
One thing to check: are you using iterm? iterm, by default (or at least this used to be the default; not sure if they fixed it) keeps indefinite scrollback history, in memory. It's perfectly possible for this to consume all your memory. It's worth checking memory usage in activity monitor, anyway. That said, "terrible corporate spyware" would be my first guess here.
dimgl 3y ago
I have two M1 machines and haven't seen a single lag spike on both.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
How much RAM do you have and do you know how much swap is in use during the lag spikes?
steve_adams_86 3y ago
I used to hit this on an M1 with low RAM while absolutely assaulting it with a project that used docker compose to run far too many resources. These days I can't seem to hit my M2 Max hard enough. Nothing slows it down. Just about anything will have lag spikes if you crank too much stuff through it, so I assume that (like me) you're experiencing this with devices running MacOS with around 8-16GB RAM, M1 processor at best?

by ki_ 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mschuster91 3y ago

> I have an M2 for my work. MacOS still gives me random lag spikes sometimes. You're most likely running low on RAM and the machine is swapping. Check in Activity Monitor what's going on.

crimsontech 3y ago

I’ve had a few corporate MacBooks sent to me by clients for security testing and they always seem much slower than my own. It’s normally down to security tooling they install on them.

charrondev 3y ago
This 100%. My personal MacBook Pro (m1 pro) feels (and benchmarks) far faster than my work M1 Max which has cylance and Jamf on it. Recently it has had a cpu core dedicated to `find / -iname log4j-core*` which has a very unreasonable impact on everything else on the machine.
- eurekin 3y ago
  oh wow! I've cought that system wide find on a few occasions and thought it was related to the specific of my employer. AFAIRC, it was scanning for vulnerable log4j versions
- ctur 3y ago
  Careful, your homedir has a CloudStorage folder and if you are using, say, Dropbox or Google Drive then that find will be incredibly slow (in addition to security software possibly slowing it down).
- camel_gopher 3y ago
  Okta verify is another resource intensive agent. 1-5% cpu to continuously stat a client side cert.
  - orf 3y ago
    Can you elaborate?!
emmet 3y ago
That's exactly what it is. Even an olympic sprinter is slow with two broken legs.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I feel a little conflicted about this. On the one hand, a lot of security software is poorly written, eats resources like it's Chrome, and introduces all kinds of microstutters through (exclusive) locks all over the place. On the other hand, many operating systems don't provide a (reliable) API to design decent security software against. Log collection is all over the place, even on Windows, which traditionally had Event Log as a well concentrated logging destination. There's no way to write good security software for an operating system that's written without security software in mind. If I were handling important secrets, I wouldn't want a fleet of machines out there with just the basic antivirus that came preinstalled with the OS (if it came with one at all). On the other hand, so many pieces of "enterprise" security management are absolutely terrible, and require one (or more) full-time employee(s) to constantly configure them, communicate with users, and solve problems, just to keep software in check. I think both operating systems and security management software need to listen to each other, and change. Operating systems need to be written with security stuff in mind, and security software needs to focus on a good user experience rather collecting than shiny buzzwords to sell to management.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Operating systems need to be written with security stuff in mind, and security software needs to focus on a good user experience rather collecting than shiny buzzwords to sell to management. They won't because by the time the users get fed the "food" the contract is long since signed and valid for a few years, and the competition isn't better so even if management could be arsed to vote with their wallet, they couldn't. Is there an actual term for "the entire industry is bullshit, but can get away with it because the cost to entry is so high that new, less bullshit competitors can't even enter the industry"?
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  > There's no way to write good security software for an operating system that's written without security software in mind. That's the job of the OS vendor: to design software such that third-party security theatre isn't necessary.
JohnBooty 3y ago
Yeah. At my previous job we had all kinds of JAMF management software and Crowdstrike (??) and it was a massive performance killer. Particularly, it seemed to be configured to scan every file on disk access, which was a performance nightmare for things like that involved "accessing lots of files" like Git on our large repo. Spotlight indexing seemed to cause some pretty big random lag spikes as well.

HumanOstrich 3y ago

Do you work for a big corporation? They tend to install a ton of spyware on work machines they issue. Lots of flakey security and monitoring software with overlapping functionality.

colingoodman 3y ago

I don't experience any such lag spikes even when I have a lot running. Are you using a Macbook Air?

sdflhasjd 3y ago
I get this on my Mac Studio when I do anything CPU-intensive, the UI becomes jittery. macOS on M CPUs seems to be particularly sensitive to this because I can push a Ryzen much harder and not notice anything in Windows.
- treprinum 3y ago
  Windows XP used to have that issue until they released some patch that prioritized UI when CPU was under stress. Linux had the same issue some time ago as well. I guess Apple will need to do something similar...

solarkraft 3y ago

Same - I've used multiple ARM Macs and they just freeze up for seconds sometimes. At this point I'm pretty sure its related to their swapping behavior.

alpaca128 3y ago
The OS really has zero hesitation to swap to sometimes insane amounts and by the time you feel it in the UI responsiveness you might already be swapping 10-20GB. 8GB is just too little for the base model. From what I've seen the OS alone will use 20-50% of that, and if I do anything productive with a couple applications and browser tabs I'm soon at 100% memory usage. Which can cause lags or short freezes when switching between applications. But on 16GB it's a very different experience, it gives decent breathing room. I think Apple really shot themselves in the foot with this, anyone using even half the CPU's potential is guaranteed to have significantly degraded performance and a worse experience.

carlmr 3y ago

>Like.. my $500 linux laptop feels smoother and faster (GUI wise) Which Linux do you use? We've had fast enough machines for fast and smooth GUI rendering for decades now. It's just that most software isn't optimized any farther than a few years back. Linux tends to be quite good on resource consumption. I can still run smooth and fast Linux on my 15 year old laptop. I can't do the same with Windows.

BirAdam 3y ago
IME, Intel’s Clear Linux is unbelievably good. Most people never give it a chance, but it runs great on core i3 from 2017 with just 8GB of RAM… and this is an OS that uses containers for almost everything. Just wonderful work by Intel’s team and contributors.

crimbles 3y ago

Not an issue for me even on my bottom end M2 mini.

Angostura 3y ago

When you say lag spikes what kind of thing are you talking about? I have an M1 iMac I run pretty’s hard and I’m not sure what kind of behaviour you’re seeing. Anything weird showing in Activity Monitor or Console?

foobar1962 3y ago
If it refers to random beach balls for 30 seconds when accessing disk ether directly or through apps... yeah I get that. I found it disappointing, a flaw in an otherwise great machine (M1 Mac mini).
- MBCook 3y ago
  Network disk drives, like SMB, are a finder killer. Have been forever. It’s like they have an exclusive lock over finder GUI updates/events. It’s sad but it’s true.
- Angostura 3y ago
  I probably see a beach ball once every 6 months. But I have 16GB RAM.
  - foobar1962 3y ago
    I have 16BG too. I have a Time Machine backup set up for a disk plugged into an AirPort Extreme, could that be the issue? (The machine connected to the network using WiFi if that matters.)

JohnBooty 3y ago

What security and management crap does your workplace mandate/preinstall, if any? My personal Macs with none of that crap perform extremely well, but that third-party security crap can be a massive killer.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

al_borland 3y ago

Is this a work laptop at a large corporation? I’ve found things my company installs can bring any system to its knees. The M1 was the first time my fans didn’t kick on randomly due to some background process, which has been nice. Windows or macOS, they found ways to screw up both. I’m sure they’d do it to Linux too, if it was supported.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rsynnott 3y ago

One thing to check: are you using iterm? iterm, by default (or at least this used to be the default; not sure if they fixed it) keeps indefinite scrollback history, in memory. It's perfectly possible for this to consume all your memory. It's worth checking memory usage in activity monitor, anyway. That said, "terrible corporate spyware" would be my first guess here.

dimgl 3y ago

I have two M1 machines and haven't seen a single lag spike on both.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago

How much RAM do you have and do you know how much swap is in use during the lag spikes?

steve_adams_86 3y ago

I used to hit this on an M1 with low RAM while absolutely assaulting it with a project that used docker compose to run far too many resources. These days I can't seem to hit my M2 Max hard enough. Nothing slows it down. Just about anything will have lag spikes if you crank too much stuff through it, so I assume that (like me) you're experiencing this with devices running MacOS with around 8-16GB RAM, M1 processor at best?