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Is my M1 MBA using too much swap memory? Why is my Intel MBP not using as much?

M

Mity

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 1, 2014
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The following Activity Monitor screenshots were taken on idle.

M1 MBA 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Monterey:
* CPU Load
https://imgur.com/u29bCbN
* Memory Pressure
https://imgur.com/ztCM5JM
* Disk
https://imgur.com/B7We0uS

Intel 2019 MBP 16" 64GB RAM 1TB SSD Catalina:
* CPU Load
https://imgur.com/uqOowQS
* Memory Pressure
https://imgur.com/1FClJqJ
* Disk
https://imgur.com/Npb4dqp

I use my M1 MBA purely for streaming (mostly YouTube) or general browsing / shopping / checking email. I use my Intel MBP for coding in Python, SQL, etc. I would think that if swap was being used, it should be used far more aggressively on my Intel MBP since I push that machine far more. Why has my M1 MBA read/written 475GB/442GB while my Intel MBP has only read/written 3.4GB/850MB? And what does this mean for the life of my SSDs? Would a 16GB M1 model improve this and by how much?

Thanks
 
Mity said:
The following Activity Monitor screenshots were taken on idle.

M1 MBA 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Monterey:
* CPU Load
https://imgur.com/u29bCbN
* Memory Pressure
https://imgur.com/ztCM5JM
* Disk
https://imgur.com/B7We0uS

Intel 2019 MBP 16" 64GB RAM 1TB SSD Catalina:
* CPU Load
https://imgur.com/uqOowQS
* Memory Pressure
https://imgur.com/1FClJqJ
* Disk
https://imgur.com/Npb4dqp

I use my M1 MBA purely for streaming (mostly YouTube) or general browsing / shopping / checking email. I use my Intel MBP for coding in Python, SQL, etc. I would think that if swap was being used, it should be used far more aggressively on my Intel MBP since I push that machine far more. Why has my M1 MBA read/written 475GB/442GB while my Intel MBP has only read/written 3.4GB/850MB? And what does this mean for the life of my SSDs? Would a 16GB M1 model improve this and by how much?

Thanks
Click to expand...
Why are you comparing a 64GB ram MBP with a 8GB one? Absurd in my opinion
 
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It will probably negligible edict on SSD life. However, seeing yellow on memory pressure indicates that you're getting close to the limits. You might try limiting the number of applications you have open at one time and/or things like multiple browser tabs. Go into Activity Monitor and see who is using memory. Go after that culprit.

I have 16gb in my M1 iMac and memory pressure rarely goes above 50%. In the east 30 days my swap file has varied from 0 to 9gb in size.
 
LuisN said:
Why are you comparing a 64GB ram MBP with a 8GB one? Absurd in my opinion
Click to expand...
From the various reviews on YouTube, claims have been made that you only need the half the RAM with Apple Silicon compared to Intel due to the difference in architecture. So, let's suppose that's true. Would having 32GB of RAM reduce the swap?

And as I've said, I don't do anything on the M1 MBA that should stress the machine. I have about 10 tabs in Chrome open along with the Apple Mail app and that's it. Why would it write 442GB just for this? These tasks are not so intensive that they require THAT much swap. The work that I'm doing on my Intel MBP is far more stressful, even with the 64GB (which, if we assume what everyone is saying, is the equivalent to 32GB on an M1 machine).
 
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glenthompson said:
It will probably negligible edict on SSD life. However, seeing yellow on memory pressure indicates that you're getting close to the limits. You might try limiting the number of applications you have open at one time and/or things like multiple browser tabs. Go into Activity Monitor and see who is using memory. Go after that culprit.

I have 16gb in my M1 iMac and memory pressure rarely goes above 50%. In the east 30 days my swap file has varied from 0 to 9gb in size.
Click to expand...

That's the weird thing. I only have 10 tabs open in Chrome with maybe two being YouTube videos. The rest are all static websites. The only other app I have open is the Apple Mail app.
 
Mity said:
From the various reviews on YouTube, claims have been made that you only need the half the RAM with Apple Silicon compared to Intel due to the difference in architecture. So, let's suppose that's true. Would having 32GB of RAM reduce the swap?
Click to expand...
Why are you supposing it's true? It's not, no matter how many YouTube talking heads have repeated that total nonsense.

Mity said:
And as I've said, I don't do anything on the M1 MBA that should stress the machine. I have about 10 tabs in Chrome open along with the Apple Mail app and that's it. Why would it write 442GB just for this?
Click to expand...
Because it's been swapping. Your perception that 10 chrome tabs and Mail shouldn't be stressful is not necessarily reality. Like, you almost certainly are not stressing CPU resources, but memory? 10 Chrome tabs can easily do that on an 8GB machine.

Mity said:
These tasks are not so intensive that they require THAT much swap. The work that I'm doing on my Intel MBP is far more stressful, even with the 64GB (which, if we assume what everyone is saying, is the equivalent to 32GB on an M1 machine).
Click to expand...
In the first place, no, 64GB on Intel is roughly the same as 64GB on M1. In the second place, your perception of what's "intensive" isn't always real - there are unintuitive things which can happen here.

The real phenomenon which caused lots of youtubers to claim you didn't need as much RAM with M1 is that even on the base model 8GB M1 Air, the slowest M1 Mac Apple sells, the SSD is so fast that some people don't even notice the performance impact of light to medium swapping. You can easily think "oh this machine is flying, that must mean it doesn't need more RAM" even though it actually does.

If you want to improve things, use Safari instead of Chrome. It's generally much less wasteful of memory, and doesn't drive Macs into swapping as easily as Chrome.
 
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Keep in mind the GPU of the M1 is integrated directly into the CPU, and uses the same RAM. Running even one YouTube video does require a decent amount of RAM, so anything non-essential at the moment is gonna get dumped to disk.

Also, what's the uptime for the M1 system? The longer you leave it running, the larger the cache file will get. Some programs don't necessarily remove their garbage from the cache file - Chrome is especially notable for that when a tab or process crashes and discreetly reloads.
 
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DanteHicks79 said:
Keep in mind the GPU of the M1 is integrated directly into the CPU, and uses the same RAM. Running even one YouTube video does require a decent amount of RAM, so anything non-essential at the moment is gonna get dumped to disk.

Also, what's the uptime for the M1 system? The longer you leave it running, the larger the cache file will get. Some programs don't necessarily remove their garbage from the cache file - Chrome is especially notable for that when a tab or process crashes and discreetly reloads.
Click to expand...

Looks like it's a combination of the above. I closed one video tab and the memory pressure subsided a bit. So, it looks like all the other tabs are being sent to swap, as you said.

The uptime is 14 days - the last restart was when I upgraded to Monterey from Big Sur.
 
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Apple_Robert said:
I have had numerous Safari video tabs open at a time while doing other things on my M1 and have rarely run into any swap file. Chrome is sucking up your resources.
Click to expand...
There are several tasks (around 10) called "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)."
 
Mity said:
From the various reviews on YouTube, claims have been made that you only need the half the RAM with Apple Silicon compared to Intel due to the difference in architecture. So, let's suppose that's true. Would having 32GB of RAM reduce the swap?
Click to expand...

This is largely misunderstood by a lot of the reviewers who talk about it online. It's true that M1 Macs handle memory a little differently in some respects (and in a lot of cases it does result in a performance boost). But it's not really true that M1 macs "need" less RAM than their Intel counterparts. Both architectures will allocate roughly the same amount of RAM for the same tasks.

Where they differ is that Apple Silicon can do memory compression in hardware, significantly reducing CPU overhead involved in handling virtual memory within workloads that result in moderate memory pressure. If the memory pressure is somewhere in the yellow range and the swap isn't being hit heavily, the M1 will generally face much less of a performance penalty for RAM compression than the Intel Mac will, and thus will better be able to handle limited memory situations in those conditions (as long as it's able to handle most of its actively used data within the RAM compressor).

Once you push the memory to its limits and start pushing lots of stuff into swap, those differences more or less vanish. They will both perform a lot worse as soon as swap starts getting used for actively used data.

In other words, they both "need" roughly the same amount of RAM for the same tasks. Both systems will face performance penalties if the RAM requirements are more than the physically available RAM. However, M1 Macs can generally do a better job of keeping this manageable (at first), and the performance penalty is usually noticeably smaller for moderate-pressure workloads that might push the memory pressure into the yellow. Once you get into Red territory, both systems pretty much even out.
 
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darngooddesign said:
Of course.

If your apps are using 12GB, you will obviously swap on an 8GB computer but not on a 32GB computer.
Click to expand...
The Intel machine is using 12GB. The M1 is using 7GB, leaving 1GB free. I'm having a hard time understanding how Google Chrome is causing this massive use in swap.
 
What kind of negative performance would one see by turning off media cache in Chrome?

I really don't see how using the SSD these days is going to negatively impact SSD life (significantly at least).
 
southerndoc said:
What kind of negative performance would one see by turning off media cache in Chrome?

I really don't see how using the SSD these days is going to negatively impact SSD life (significantly at least).
Click to expand...
It takes a lot to wear out one of Apple's SSD's.

I think some of the problem stems from people spending too much time on the internet reading obsessive type posts and then projecting that kind of angst onto themselves and their new Apple machine.
 
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southerndoc said:
What kind of negative performance would one see by turning off media cache in Chrome?

I really don't see how using the SSD these days is going to negatively impact SSD life (significantly at least).
Click to expand...
To be fair, the people talking about it were seeing massive amounts of data written, like 20+TB per month on the base 256GB drive, one person saw 35TB written over a day or two. Mine averages around 1TB per month which is not an amount to worry about on my 1TB SSD.
 
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I'm wondering how much swap my 2012 iMac i7 used. It's still working fine (use it as my daughter's classroom computer now if she misses school). Honestly, like you said, I would've never even checked had I not read about it on here. I'm not that worried about it. I'm sure Apple would not have implemented it if there was a concern for ruining the SSD. The 35TB writes in a day or two was a bug if I'm understanding things correctly, and that might have shortened the lifespan of the SSD if it occurred for a while.
 
southerndoc said:
I'm wondering how much swap my 2012 iMac i7 used. It's still working fine (use it as my daughter's classroom computer now if she misses school). Honestly, like you said, I would've never even checked had I not read about it on here. I'm not that worried about it. I'm sure Apple would not have implemented it if there was a concern for ruining the SSD. The 35TB writes in a day or two was a bug if I'm understanding things correctly, and that might have shortened the lifespan of the SSD if it occurred for a while.
Click to expand...
The larger the drive, and the more RAM you have, the less of a concern it is. But yeah, the 8/256 Airs were concerned.
 
it's the only Intel versions you using! Rosetta seems to use so much swap it's not funny any more! To me it's lazy and crazy developers are still using Intel only versions anymore sense only one Mac uses Intel anymore (Mac Pro) and many redial people seem to thing that Mac Pro with them upcoming M2 this late Fall for the Christmas shopping season! So these developers and get a base Mac Mini to use that to make a Universal version at least to be up to date if you want to stay in business! Heck even Adobe made their software Universal so why can't you, are you that fly by night?
 
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