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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

My new M1 constantly freezes, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of chrome. Or the secret SSD thrashing design flaw that Apple is hoping nobody talks about till they quietly fix it.

Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.

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I use an M1 powered 16GB MacBook Air and I've never seen any freezing, even under heavy load. I don't use Google Chrome though.

Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.

Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm, one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs open in Preview. I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.

The unfortunate part is, when it freezes, it does the beachball for a full minute before I successfully execute a “switch to activity monitor / s click topmost process / force quit / confirm” sequence. Each step takes around 45 seconds to complete. I assume Apple QA never tested the extreme edges of workloads.

One poor guy on Twitter is already up to 18% of his SSD lifetime, in the first three months of having an M1. We had a heart to heart about how silly it was that the drive will die within a year, that Apple better replace it under warranty, and so on. But it’s a coin toss whether he’ll just have to eat the cost and buy a new one: https://twitter.com/_wli/status/1364934834229977090?s=21

If I do the same in my intel Mac book pro, it not only screams, burns but also slows down. honestly intel chips are overrated and overpriced.

This is heavy load for any machine unless it's configured as a bona fide workstation. Any machine, any OS (with M1 MacBook Air's HW configuration) would trash its SSD while swapping in that case, IMHO.

> I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.

When I'm in development mode with all cylinders firing, I have a single Eclipse window in CDT perspective, a couple of terminal tabs, Zeal (or Dash) for documentation and a couple of firefox tabs for documentation not available in Zeal.

Music is either supplied by a single YouTube tab or Spotify, and that's it.

The most unfortunate component is CPU in my case. I try to ooze every single bit of performance from it while running the application. Memory controller comes the second due to transfer operations but, I neither max out the RAM or cause system to do heavy swapping.

I'm always kind of conscious about the hardware resources of the system and minimize my resource usage habitually, without killing productivity.

Well on Linux my 16GB thinkpad would thrash for more than 60 seconds unless I sysrq.

This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I

The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.

Thank you for finding this!

Unfortunately, and somewhat sadly, and melanchololy, I must report that I've been at OS version 11.2.3 (the latest) and run almost zero Rosetta apps: KeepassX, Beyond Compare, and Optimal Layout; of those, Optimal Layout has read 100GB, which is almost nothing.

In comparison, my kernel_task process is at 43TB bytes written, and WindowServer is at 8TB read.

So, as with cancer, there are multiple contributing factors, and hopefully Apple will ship an update to fix it... someday.

Surprise. I bought the rose... theory. Sigh.

Thrash is an odd word for an SSD... I mean, there's no moving parts, so I can't imagine how it's thrashing about.

Swamping an SSD with write requests and forcing it to write-level aggressively is trashing an SSD IMHO. Since it both silently grinds to fulfill the requests and loses a lot of lifespan during the process.

I am genuinely curious how you keep track of all that. Presumably this is all spread out over maybe a dozen workspaces?

Possibly multiple desktops.

I’m reminded of the podcast ATP and the great episode ‘The Windows of Siracusa County’. John’s window management system is both baffling and amazing. It’s a good listen.

https://atp.fm/96

And here I am, thinking that heavy load is one node instance running webpack, a sql server, vscode, Figma and a few chrome tabs.

> 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos

> around 35 macvim windows

You do you, but I'd wager you could probably trim some of that low hanging fat

I was going to say, there's no humanely possible way you can watch and absorb the content from 5+ videos at the same time right? Like what's even the point? (I presume tabs with videos on them that aren't playing still perform around the same as tabs without videos at all, since there's no need to re-paint frames.)

The surprising part is that you have attention to spare for all those distractions.

a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos

How many eyes do you have?

Sounds like you should report it in Feedback Assistant since you have an unusual workload.

Apple doesn't and shouldn't care about optimizing for your use-case. At some point, the user should be responsible for stopping processes when they're not using them anymore.

I understand the idea of integrating everything to reduce the electronic footprint, but some stuff like RAM and storage should be serviceable outside of replacing the entire board..

Same here, zero freezing and amazing performance. I use Safari though and have not even installed Chrome.

I consider Chrome harmful TBH. I use Safari and Firefox (and I sync it with my other, non-apple computers).

Is the the 8GB model? I had the same issue with my workload and found that it was always under high memory pressure, upgrading to a 16GB model fixed it for me.

It’s the 16GB. The memory pressure is indeed the issue. I find it hilarious that Apple accidentally inverted their LRU into an MRU and constantly swaps for no reason, yet it’s still so fast that nobody even noticed during QA. Mine has already read/wrote 48TB in the first three weeks; at this rate the SSD will be dead in three years.

(If you haven’t looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check your smartmon to see whether you’re affected.)

This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I

The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.

Emulated apps don’t use more memory. It’s more likely Activity Monitor calculates their usage wrong, it doesn’t show very accurate numbers in the first place.

Any sources for that. I did a quick web search but didn’t find any conclusions to the saga.

Chrome is by far the worst-performing browser on my (Intel-based) Mac with many tabs open. It doesn’t come anywhere close to keeping up with my browsing style, wasting tons of system resources, glitching, crashing, etc.... and then oh wow the battery drain.

Safari is best, but Firefox is also pretty decent nowadays.

I have the same issue with freezing regularly. Using emacs aarch64 build and clang from llvm sources ( or OS X native clang, either one ) compiling in emacs window (Mx compile) and it will stop, hang for about 10 seconds, and then reboot. Rosetta isn’t in this chain. Haven’t looked to find why yet, but task switch to Apple news while I’m waiting and I can see the build in emacs halt for a while. Task switch works after a while, but sometimes it doesn’t and a watchdog kicks in it seems.

I actually have an orthogonal issue, but I wonder if it's related. When I have an external monitor connected via a Thunderbolt dock, the device takes forever to wake from hibernation (that is to say when I've left it on sleep for several hours). i.e. 10+ seconds, which is kind of ridiculous in 2021. This doesn't happen when the monitor is not connected. I also have a similar amount of things open as you described

Not m1; but unplug and plug it back helps a lot

What about Safari?

That's a perfectly valid question. Lots of people use Chrome because they've used Chrome, and that's the whole reason. Some people need Chrome because it supports some site or tool that they require. I recommend that everyone else at least try Safari and see what they think of it.

When I first had my M1, I ironically had to use Canary for stability purposes

Last time I tried it (couple of months ago) there were practically no extensions and Bitwarden didn't work in incognito. And Chrome's UI/UX is simply great. And dev tools as well.

That’s a personal preference thing. Personally I think chrome UI/UX is horrible and slow. Ut I’m a safari user so again: personal preference.

Sure, I've never used Safari enough myself to have an opinion (since it's never been an option for me due to various things), it might be equal to Chrome or even better (I like Safari's clean UI). I'm mostly comparing it to Firefox which is quite clunky in my opinion (I've given it many chances).

And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mode. Maybe it's time to give it yet another shot. :)

Whoa.

Maybe an hour into testing Safari and I look at Activity Monitor and see that https://calendar.google.com is consuming 1 GB of RAM and https://docs.google.com 865 MB. :o

Don't know if the numbers are comparable but in Chrome's Task Manager the numbers are 224 MB and 121 MB respectively.

Edit: This might be an old (unfixed) issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6640430 ... This sucks because I have a specific doc and the calendar that I always keep open in pinned tabs. There are some other sites with seemingly quite high RAM usage as well. Well at least nothing is lagging so I guess I'll just chug on and see what happens.

Edit2: This behavior is just insane. I closed those two tabs and suddenly Gmail shoots up from out of the blue to 1.22 GB?! Then I reopen the two previous tabs (doc/calendar) again and Gmail stays the same while Calendar goes on a diet and sits at 187 MB (doc at 983). This is super weird. I'll just keep them open and see how it behaves overall, might just be wonky numbers?

It sounds like they are sharing memory and the shared memory is getting accounted to whatever tab was opened first until it closes.

I recently got an M1 mac myself and tried Safari out again -- I seldom used it on my 2016 Pro (preferred Firefox) but it's supposed to have stellar battery life, so why not give it a go?

Nice that they've got built-in tracking protection now, I guess, but I left Twitter running in a tab overnight and when I woke up Safari was reporting over a gb of memory use for that tab alone. Something in how they cache or handle JS for some of these long-running services, or maybe having to do with service workers ?, Safari just seems to consume a lot of memory. It's not a huge issue I guess, with the way the M1 never seems to have any memory pressure issues, but it's part of why I remember switching off Safari in the first place.

If anyone knows why Safari seems to consume more memory with these long-running processes, I'd be real curious to know why...

Battery life has been the reason for me trying it in the past as well.

And yeah I mean even though Activity Monitor is reporting high RAM usage I don't seem to have any memory pressure issues so it might not be that big of a deal (MBP 2015 w/ 8 GB RAM).

I'm actually considering getting an M1 myself next week. Have been waiting for the initial kinks to get sorted out and most apps ported to it and I think it's time now. :) SSD wear seems to have been resolved with the latest Big Sur versions and fewer Rosetta apps and now even ST4 beta has an M1 build.

My justifications are that I'll get an excuse to upgrade to 16 GB RAM and I'll get touch ID so I can have a more secure password and not have to type it all the time. And with the stellar performance and battery life of the M1 I can just keep using Chrome (Brave). :P

Meh.

New tabs are opening in weird places, really faaaar to the right skipping between 6-7 (unrelated) tabs. Really cumbersome to navigate.

Horrible selection of extensions still. Really missing searching for any tab with Cmd+Shift+K (I often have ~100 tabs open across multiple windows) that I get with the Tab Switcher extension.

There's a Noscript equivalent extension but it costs $3...

And I can't initiate a search with "url bar -> you[tab]<searchterm>[enter]" (for a Youtube search).

Meh. Safari just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I sat down for a week or two and wrote a bunch of extensions myself but I don't see the value in that.

On the plus side Safari does seem snappy but then again I only have ~30 tabs open (across 6 windows) currently. So I might give it a win on speed but it definitely loses in overall usability.

Will try again in a year or so.

Edit: OH SHIT this is a definite dealbraker - apparently I can't select multiple tabs by Shift-clicking to pull them out into a new window. That completely kills my workflow of separating topics into different windows, and/or closing tabs in bulk.

Edit2: Wtf, how didn't I notice this earlier - I cannot see the URL when hovering over a link. How does anyone consider this within the realm of good UX?

Command+/ will fire up the status bar for Safari which shows you the URLS.

Ok that's a weird default...

For your last issue you can see it when you display status bar.

Ok that's a weird default...

This does not happen to me on Firefox, I am running 2 windows with dozen tabs each.

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