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Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

macOS has terrible resource management (probably a fault of the developers of various major apps). EDIT: Lmao, look at kernel_task, a mysterious phantasm that seems to be using 2gb at any moment. Look at other abstract, undocumented Apple processes that just exist, and you have no control over them. It's literally insane.

Electron has even worse resource management, since its built on top of Chromium, which doesn't even attempt to make any reasonable decisions about how much resources can be utilized. I find it truly remarkable that 5 years ago I could use an 8GB MBP with no issue, and now with a 16GB MBP I get daily warnings about running out of space, because of RubyMine (I get it), Discord, and Chrome.

Maybe instead of writing all these articles about how JavaScript is great and the new-wave, actually writing apps that can stay bounded to 250MB memory?

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Because of how the compositing works, it’s not uncommon to have 100 or more megabytes of RAM taken by the UI alone. Not a bad thing though, it allows for simpler and more performant animations.

Other than that, I’m not familiar with any particular features of the OS that unnecessary spend resources. Do you have examples?

Finder (made 10000x worse by their "inadvertent" disabling of DaisyDisk because of "security")

Mail (completely garbage, can't update 300 emails within 5 hours), yet takes up 400mb in the Activity Monitor

Not identifying what exactly is the 1.18gb "java" process thats running right now (maybe elasticsearch? why not surface this info in activity monitor?)

I mean I have a million examples, I try to do lots of novel research and development and my machine is paralyzed by all these insane background processes, despite the fact that I have a 16gb, top of the line MBP as of last year. It's an insane joke.

EDIT: it is really interesting you are telling me that animations and UI graphics processing are important when it takes away from actual serious work/processing. Everyday I have to shut down my conputer to get to a clean slate because I have no visibility into the background processes occurring.

I guess that drop shadow is really worth the extra 100kb memory footprint!

Are you sure you're looking at the "real" RAM usage? Apps nowadays are allowed to claim up to 4 GB of virtual memory. On my machine I'm seeing Finder reported to have taken 800MB in total, but only 160MB of real memory.

I'm not sure if animations, blurs and shadows are important to everyone, but I find them pleasant to look at while I'm doing my serious work. Although I must say that if I could virtualize macOS, I'd prefer a Linux laptop.

I might be characterizing the nomenclature improperly, all I know is that I'm running a handful of processes that are critical to my work and things are hung up constantly on a machine that is dated 2018. Shrugs

Isn’t this elasticsearch’s fault?

Personally, I’ve never experienced the resource management issues you describe here, even when running similar workloads. I have a 2015 MBP with 16 GB.

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