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macOS assigns background/low priority tasks to the efficiency cores on Apple Silicon (via GCD QoS). The efficiency cores use so little power that they can run flat out without generating enough heat to spin up the fans. It also means that all the performance cores remain free to use as you please - background tasks can gobble up the efficiency cores with negligible impact on performance.
Deep dive on just this from the always excellent Eclectic Light Company:

 
It 100% is if no one else can recreate the problem and you can't explain it.
Then you are 100% incorrect since you cannot google process name and find described bug in internet places like Apple Forums with 60 users with same problem. What's wrong with this user blaming for hanging background processes in Apple software, why?
 
I am curious about something related.
An hour after startup (on 10.15.7 and using Mail, Edge & TextEdit so obvs. not very demanding) photolibraryd is no.1 cpu time and media-indexer no.4, above any of those apps, media-indexer is in fifth place for memory and photolibraryd is 1st place for Disc with 8.2 GB! (Several times larger than my Photos Library.) Oh, and I haven't added anything to Photos for 5 years 😂. I have no justifiable issue with it and don't need/want a fix, but I can't help feeling that Apple has a 'f*ck it, we gave him enough memory so let's just do it regardless' attitude.

Amusingly softwareupdated is also continuously running several years after Apple stopped proving me with updates. I wouldn't have been irritated thinking I would have to upgrade to 16GB a year ago if they were just a teensy bit more efficient in their programming.


If your machine is lightly loaded, things like photo download, photo processing (indexing for search, etc.), software update checking, etc. will will run in the background. If your machine is doing very little then yes, those things will be top of the list.

If your machine starts doing actual work, those processes are scheduled for background/low/idle priority and will be pushed aside while your more important work happens.

Why are these things running? So things like spotlight, etc. are fast when you run them. So that when you do things like searching your photos for text or animals or whatever work fast when you want to do that.

Turn those services off? Sure. But they don't cost much to run in the background on the efficiency cores, and the benefit is very fast search performance when you actually want to do those things.

Like RAM, idle time on your machine is an opportunity for it to do things in advance of you needing things. Indexing media, downloading photos from iCloud and checking for updates are some of those things.
 
Then you are 100% incorrect since you cannot google process name and find described bug in internet places like Apple Forums with 60 users with same problem. What's wrong with this user blaming for hanging background processes in Apple software, why?

60 Users out of the entire Apple user base - that's not even a statistically significant number to warrant calling anything a trend.
 
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60 Users out of the entire Apple user base - that's not even a statistically significant number to warrant calling anything a trend.
Who is calling this a trend? I only see a trend of blaming users for Apple bugs with 100% confidence. I guess I'm missing context of these dumb exaggerations with first 4 pages of OP stuff, so you can ignore me and have fun.
 
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I'm not going to switch to Windows. I will be running Linux and Windows, just like what I did in the past before I went Mac. And I still have a M2 MacBook Air and M1 Max MacBook Pro, so I still have access to Mac OS. But I see no point buying a new Mac when Mac OS is so horribly inefficient.

Well, Windows Vista was a mess, just like the current Mac OS, that I'm even running out of memory on a M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32GB RAM.
I have run out of memory on a 512GB Unified Memory Mac Studio M3 Ultra. Happens to all of us if we run too many apps/processes. I don’t feel like 32GB is all that much memory to run a professional workload anyway.
 
I have run out of memory on a 512GB Unified Memory Mac Studio M3 Ultra. Happens to all of us if we run too many apps/processes. I don’t feel like 32GB is all that much memory to run a professional workload anyway.
That all depends on the tools you need, doesn’t it. I work in AutoCAD mostly, and 18GB has been plenty! I’d like more, but that’s just for mucking about with. I have no professional need for more.
 
I have run out of memory on a 512GB Unified Memory Mac Studio M3 Ultra. Happens to all of us if we run too many apps/processes. I don’t feel like 32GB is all that much memory to run a professional workload anyway.

What is your definition of running out of memory?
How did this incident manifest itself?
In other words, is this something that you would have noticed, and how, without looking at the activity monitor?

I’m not trying to criticise your post (you clearly have an extraordinarily powerful workstation for extraordinarily demanding tasks), but I think part of the misunderstanding with the OP seems to be that he focuses on memory allocation, and then perceive it as a problem when the OS is doing its job of using all available memory.
By that definition, one will always run out of memory regardless of the amount they have on their machine.
 
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If your machine is lightly loaded, things like photo download, photo processing (indexing for search, etc.), software update checking, etc. will will run in the background. If your machine is doing very little then yes, those things will be top of the list.

If your machine starts doing actual work, those processes are scheduled for background/low/idle priority and will be pushed aside while your more important work happens...
Thanks for you reply. It's somewhat remarkable that I've never considered these things in those terms - maybe I'm still in the 90's mindset where every MB felt like it determined what you could or couldn't do. I've only needed to replace my Mac twice since then.
 
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What is your definition of running out of memory?
How did this incident manifest itself?
In other words, is this something that you would have noticed, and how, without looking at the activity monitor?

I’m not trying to criticise your post (you clearly have an extraordinarily powerful workstation for extraordinarily demanding tasks), but I think part of the misunderstanding with the OP seems to be that he focuses on memory allocation, and then perceive it as a problem when the OS is doing its job of using all available memory.
By that definition, one will always run out of memory regardless of the amount they have on their machine.
Actually, my whole Mac Studio gave a memory warning as it became unresponsive. I was running multiple instances of LLMs and trying something I hadn’t before. The point isn’t that it happened, it’s that any machine can be pushed beyond its limits and fail. I would say for most people 16 or 32GB of memory would be sufficient, but for some people it isn’t. Apple wouldn’t sell higher configurations if they weren’t needed by some.

Edit: one other thing I was running a Rosetta 2 app and that somehow caused it to go over the memory available as my workload was only about 350GB until that app started showing it was taking resources. It happens. I am not going to blame anyone and cry about it. Just saying it happens to everyone so not surprising it would happen on a 32GB Mac if it can happen to a Mac with over 160GB of memory free until when it wasn’t.
 
If you’re that unhappy I’ll gladly take it off your hands for your sake!

Just PM me and I’ll give you a mailing address. :)
 
You guys are really missing the point here. This is not user error from my side. Cloud computing has minimal impact on a local computer.

This is about Apple having silly ass background processes like "mediaanalysisd" that was eating at some point 8GB RAM.
At least for once you gave an example. Here's the deal, as you do not seem to understand how macOS actually works. This is fine of course, in the end we are users, but when starting to complain it's sure worth it to actually dig a little deeper. As Apple publicly on stage explained several years (could be as far back as macOS Lion?!) RAM in a computer basically consumes the same amount of energy no matter whether used or not. Thats why apple started to use caching in many parts of the OS, to try to preload files which it assumes are gonna be used next into RAM, so some user tasks end up being executed faster. Also these processes, while "clobbering" up RAM, immediately unallocated RAM when a user tasks needs it. Regarding theses mechanics high RAM usage is actually a feature.
Reading these media scanning processes: These take place for several reasons, and are local rather than cloud based like google and others. Also the database constructed by it's findings remains local as well, and even is excluded from any kind of macOS/iOS native backup solutions, thus needs to be recreated when setting up a new machine but also when coping files from external volumes, downloading content, new safes and so on. The features this enables include people recognition of your contacts (photoanalysisd) and contents analysis so media can better be found from spotlight. It enables features like being able to find documents by content (and fast!), rather than by document name among other things.
Also you cannot compare memory usage among different OS easily. For one all OS are setup differently and enable different use cases. What's more easily comparable are specific scenarios, where the same applications exists for different systems, but even than those applications might (and should, if they are optimized!) rely on different system APIs. So basically to evaluate an OS ask yourself, if it enables you to do what you need it to do, and wether it does so in a timely manner prioritizing metrics important to you like ease of use, energy consumption, time, reliability, and joy of use. It has never lead to anything comparing devices by GHz, RAM, MP, mAH or whatever hardware metric. It's about what the resources you purchased enable you to do.
 
Memory swapping = more disk usage.

MacRumors loves to make up stuff in order to blame me, when it's pretty much common knowledge that the disk is used when running out of memory.
Yes it is, but only if there is space to spare. You would never run into a situation where you cannot save a file to disk on macOS because of swap memory. User task always have a higher priority.
 
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So, I can see that OP disappeared after setting everyone on fire 🤣

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