4 ms·

I have a 16" M1 Pro with 16 gigs of ram, and it regularly struggles under the "load" of Firebase emulator. You can tell not because the system temp rises, but

I have a 16" M1 Pro with 16 gigs of ram, and it regularly struggles under the "load" of Firebase emulator. You can tell not because the system temp rises, but because suddenly Spotify audio begins to pop, constantly and irregularly. It took me a year to figure out that the system audio popping wasn't hardware and indeed wasn't software, except in the sense that memory (or CPU?) pressure seems to be the culprit.

maxioatic 2y ago
I have a 14" M1 Max with 32gb of ram for work, and it does that popping noise every once it a while too! I've always wondered what was causing it.
- SSLy 2y ago
  Im relatively surprised modern Macs have same buffer underrun issue I had on intel laptops with pulseaudio 7+ years back.
silvr 2y ago
Whoa! I've been so annoyed by this for years, so interesting that you figured it out. It's the kind of inelegance in design that would have had Steve Jobs yelling at everyone to fix, just ruins immersion in music and had no obvious way to fix.
- astrange 2y ago
  That sounds like an app issue, it might be doing non-realtime-safe operations on a realtime thread. But generally speaking, if you have an issue, use feedback assistant.
  - drozycki 2y ago
    It happens in Safari and Music.app. I find that Airpods exacerbate the issue too.
zaptrem 2y ago
This happens whenever I load up one of our PyTorch models on my M1 MBP 16gb too. I also hate the part where if the model (or any other set of programs) uses too much RAM the whole system will sometimes straight up hang and then crash due to kernel watchdog timeout instead of just killing the offender.
- astrange 2y ago
  There is an API `proc_setpcontrol` which absolutely noone uses which does the thing you want. It definitely gets unstable in those situations, but you probably don't want your scripts randomly OOM killed either.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    > There is an API `proc_setpcontrol` which absolutely noone Gee, I wonder why. $ man proc_setpcontrol No manual entry for proc_setpcontrol
  - zaptrem 2y ago
    Sorry what is the thing I want in this case? No stuttering or no crashing?
    - astrange 2y ago
      Killing the process instead of affecting (or crashing) the rest of the system.
      - zaptrem 2y ago
        This is almost completely undocumented outside of this HN post (check Google). Can you tell us more about what this does and how it is intended to be used? Thanks!
duped 2y ago
This kind of sounds like someone is abusing perf cores and high priority threading in your stack. iirc, on MacOS audio workgroup threads are supposed to be scheduled with the highest (real time) priority on p cores, which shouldn't have issues under load, unless someone else is trying to compete at the same priority.
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  There is some discussion online on whether this happens when you have a Rosetta app running in the background somewhere (say a util you got via Homebrew, for example). Even when I remove all "Intel" type apps in activity monitor, I still experience the issue though.
FuckButtons 2y ago
I’ve had something similar happen as a bug when I was using a python sound device and calling numpy functions inside its stream callback. Took me a long time to figure out that numpy subroutines that drop the GIL would cause the audio stream to stall.
pier25 2y ago
I hear popping when Chrome opens a big image or something similar. I always assumed it was a Chrome issue.

maxioatic 2y ago

I have a 14" M1 Max with 32gb of ram for work, and it does that popping noise every once it a while too! I've always wondered what was causing it.

SSLy 2y ago
Im relatively surprised modern Macs have same buffer underrun issue I had on intel laptops with pulseaudio 7+ years back.

silvr 2y ago

Whoa! I've been so annoyed by this for years, so interesting that you figured it out. It's the kind of inelegance in design that would have had Steve Jobs yelling at everyone to fix, just ruins immersion in music and had no obvious way to fix.

astrange 2y ago
That sounds like an app issue, it might be doing non-realtime-safe operations on a realtime thread. But generally speaking, if you have an issue, use feedback assistant.
- drozycki 2y ago
  It happens in Safari and Music.app. I find that Airpods exacerbate the issue too.

zaptrem 2y ago

This happens whenever I load up one of our PyTorch models on my M1 MBP 16gb too. I also hate the part where if the model (or any other set of programs) uses too much RAM the whole system will sometimes straight up hang and then crash due to kernel watchdog timeout instead of just killing the offender.

astrange 2y ago
There is an API `proc_setpcontrol` which absolutely noone uses which does the thing you want. It definitely gets unstable in those situations, but you probably don't want your scripts randomly OOM killed either.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  > There is an API `proc_setpcontrol` which absolutely noone Gee, I wonder why. $ man proc_setpcontrol No manual entry for proc_setpcontrol
- zaptrem 2y ago
  Sorry what is the thing I want in this case? No stuttering or no crashing?
  - astrange 2y ago
    Killing the process instead of affecting (or crashing) the rest of the system.
    - zaptrem 2y ago
      This is almost completely undocumented outside of this HN post (check Google). Can you tell us more about what this does and how it is intended to be used? Thanks!

duped 2y ago

This kind of sounds like someone is abusing perf cores and high priority threading in your stack. iirc, on MacOS audio workgroup threads are supposed to be scheduled with the highest (real time) priority on p cores, which shouldn't have issues under load, unless someone else is trying to compete at the same priority.

unsupp0rted 2y ago
There is some discussion online on whether this happens when you have a Rosetta app running in the background somewhere (say a util you got via Homebrew, for example). Even when I remove all "Intel" type apps in activity monitor, I still experience the issue though.

FuckButtons 2y ago

I’ve had something similar happen as a bug when I was using a python sound device and calling numpy functions inside its stream callback. Took me a long time to figure out that numpy subroutines that drop the GIL would cause the audio stream to stall.

pier25 2y ago

I hear popping when Chrome opens a big image or something similar. I always assumed it was a Chrome issue.