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only time i had slowdowns running LLMs on my M3 Max was when i was hitting the context limit so the memory pressure was hitting high yellow / red.

I don't think I had the issue before macOS 26, but honestly I have no way to tell. I did run into one other HN commenter that suffers from the same slowness problem, but they didn't connect it to workloads, only uptime. I think it was the same issue though.

fwiw I also observed a persisting slowdown soon after upgrading my Studio to OSX 26. Since I haven't been using it very much I'm short on data bearing on the cause -- maybe it was GPU use though I don't recall doing anything like that.

I know that if I don't use LLMs, the machine lasts much longer without getting slow. If I do however, it gets slow very quickly and does not recover until a reboot. Super annoying.

My Intel Mac from 2015 could be up for months without interruption or slowdown. (mostly because I stopped updating after Mojave, but my point is it never needed a reboot)

Never.