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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to be snarky here, but... it'll probably come across that way.

Will we ever see the end of beach balls? I've got an m1 Mac mini, and ... I see far fewer, but I still see them. I don't understand what with so many core, so must 'fast' and 'powerful' stuff, that my computer will still freeze and lag doing seemingly normal stuff.

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The beachball isn't directly related to CPU speed. It indicates the main thread of the foreground app is busy for more than a few seconds. It may be, for example, blocked waiting for something from the network -- which is one reason it's important for macOS developers to move filesystem and network access to background threads as much as possible.

It's been a while since I developed on Mac OS, but ISTR that beach balls happen when the main thread blocks and doesn't respond to events. If an application does that it's due to the developer putting too much on the main thread, as much as whatever the CPU's doing.

Based on long experience I suspect most beachballs nowadays are because of locks, not lack of CPU cycles. The UI thread is waiting for something to happen in the background that should have been fast, so the developer did it synchronously, but for some reason it isn’t. Maybe a helper process failed, or there’s a network glitch, or maybe the developer just didn’t get multithread locking right and the wait will never end. In any case, a faster processor does nothing to help.

https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com

Good reason to support Linux port project.

That's less of an Apple problem and more of a developer problem.

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