M1 Air - Is my swap usage normal?

[phl92]

Hey guys,
I bought my Macbook Air M1 (512GB; 8GB RAM) around 1,5 years ago, for a travelling device mainly used for browsing and Zoom/Skype meetings. Lately I need to use heavier load on it and even though he handles all very well (for the specs) I am a bit worried when I look from time to time in the Activity Monitor.
I use IntelliJ, Eclipe CLion (mostly 2 of them), 2-3 Browser windows with 10-15 tabs open each, and 2 VM's simultenously, sometimes 3! (Win 11, Kali Linux, Fedora) and he really gets only a bit slow when also using these VM's together.
But of course all these tasks need RAM, and he swaps a ton! Is swap general a bad thing for longevity of my SSD?

And I also wonder, that now my Activity manger shows a lot of Swap even though I have only Safari, and Activity Monitor open (nothing else), but Swap is not going really down?!

 

[TSE]

I would stop focusing so heavily on activity monitor and just see if it's fast enough.

Your use case evolved. What can you really do? Swapping memory isn't all that bad - I have 16 GBs of RAM on my Air and I swap similarly to that when I'm rendering amongst other things and I'm still happy with the performance.

 

[phl92]

As I said I am very happy with my Mac Air even with heavy tasks... I was just wondering if huge Swaps over time decrease the longevity of the SSDs?

 

[TSE]

As I said I am very happy with my Mac Air even with heavy tasks... I was just wondering if huge Swaps over time decrease the longevity of the SSDs?

Yes they technically do, but today's SSDs are so good that you won't notice.

 

[Fishrrman]

It's because of the RAM.
For the m series CPU's, 8gb is no longer "enough".

The reason is just what you have described:
excessive VM disk swapping, page ins/outs, because of the way the new "unified memory" CPU/RAM/drive seems to operate.

How I overcame this:
With the MacBook Pro 14" (which comes with 16gb of RAM), I used the terminal to DISABLE VM disk swapping.
Activity Monitor now ALWAYS reads thusly:

If I open terminal to check swap usage, I get:
vm.swapusage: total = 0.00M used = 0.00M free = 0.00M (encrypted)

Runs great.
NEVER crashes.
I DO take care as to not "overload" the RAM with programs that don't need to be running.

 

[phl92]

It's because of the RAM.
For the m1 series, 8gb is no longer "enough".

The reason is just what you have described:
excessive VM disk swapping, page ins/outs, because of the way the new "unified memory" CPU/RAM/drive seems to operate.

How I overcame this:
With the MacBook Pro 14" (which comes with 16gb of RAM), I used the terminal to DISABLE VM disk swapping.
Activity Monitor now ALWAYS reads thusly:
View attachment 2107368
If I open terminal to check swap usage, I get:
vm.swapusage: total = 0.00M used = 0.00M free = 0.00M (encrypted)

Runs great.
NEVER crashes.
I DO take care as to not "overload" the RAM with programs that don't need to be running.

Not sure if I understand you correctly: you limit yourself by forbidding Swapping, right?
But yeah I guess 16GB is still enough for this power machine... I am in a different situation with only 8GB...
When I bought I never thought I will do this tasks on an Air... but its working so why not

 

[chrfr]

Not sure if I understand you correctly: you limit yourself by forbidding Swapping, right?
But yeah I guess 16GB is still enough for this power machine... I am in a different situation with only 8GB...
When I bought I never thought I will do this tasks on an Air... but its working so why not

If it's working for you, and it seems that it is, just use the computer and don't worry about swap. The disk won't wear out in any likely timespan.

 

[Toutou]

The 4,62 GB memory footprint of WindowServer looks a little too big, does this go down when you close everything else?

 

[Basic75]

As I said I am very happy with my Mac Air even with heavy tasks... I was just wondering if huge Swaps over time decrease the longevity of the SSDs?

Every cell in a modern SSD can only do about 1000 erase-write cycles. You do the math.

 

[phl92]

The 4,62 GB memory footprint of WindowServer looks a little too big, does this go down when you close everything else?

Hi,
I closed ALL apps (Tab + Q) except for the finder, and the Window server task went down from 4,62 GB to 4,43 GB.. so actually nothing changed. Also Swap was still more than 4GB.
Now I restarted my Mac and the Window server is around 200MB big. Also 0 Bytes swapped.

I did not know it is good to restart the Mac from time to time. I literally never turn the Mac off, I appreciate to just open the screen and start working.

 

[TSE]

Every cell in a modern SSD can only do about 1000 erase-write cycles. You do the math.

That is fear mongering - SSD even with normal swap will outlast a typical user's use of their notebook.

 

[pshufd]

Most Apple users probably have a decent amount of swap as most buy the base models. I like to run with no swap but it's an expensive approach. What you could do is run DxDrive to see what the wear levels are and extrapolate the useful life of the SSD. I did this with my systems and it came out to around 100 years. I'm not too worried about SSD lifetime with that.

 

[Basic75]

That is fear mongering - SSD even with normal swap will outlast a typical user's use of their notebook.

How is citing tech specs fear mongering?

I explicitly didn't draw any conclusions and told him to do his own math so he can come to his own conclusion about whether it's a problem or not.

 

[EugW]

If it's fast enough, I wouldn't worry too much about it. That said, I think your machine is underspec'd with regards to RAM, for your recent heavier usage.

Most Apple users probably have a decent amount of swap as most buy the base models. I like to run with no swap but it's an expensive approach. What you could do is run DxDrive to see what the wear levels are and extrapolate the useful life of the SSD. I did this with my systems and it came out to around 100 years. I'm not too worried about SSD lifetime with that.

What are the longevity specs of these MBA SSDs? I bought a used OEM SSD for a 2015 MacBook Pro and it had over 100 TB writes after about 5 years, with wear leveling health of 67%. I guess that translates to SSD longevity of 300 TB writes, with a useful life of about 15 years at that rate of usage. It's for my kid though, and her SSD writes will likely be a small fraction of what the drive saw before, so even with <200 TB of writes left, that probably could last her decades.

 

[pshufd]

If it's fast enough, I wouldn't worry too much about it. That said, I think your machine is underspec'd with regards to RAM, for your recent heavier usage.


What are the longevity specs of these MBA SSDs? I bought a used OEM SSD for a 2015 MacBook Pro and it had over 100 TB writes after about 5 years, with wear leveling health of 67%. I guess that translates to SSD longevity of 300 TB writes, with a useful life of about 15 years at that rate of usage. It's for my kid though, and her SSD writes will likely be a small fraction of what the drive saw before, so even with <200 TB of writes left, that probably could last her decades.

View attachment 2107426

It's a function of the number of chips for the Apple Silicon systems. It was posted the long SSD write thread and I just extrapolated out. If the SSD were a problem, then I would turn the MacBook into a desktop with an external SSD. I suspect that SSDs in general will outlast the useful life of the system unless you're using your MacBook as a Postgres server.

 

[bobcomer]

When I bought I never thought I will do this tasks on an Air... but its working so why not

Precisely. And the ssd wont wear out in any useful computer lifetime.

 

[chrfr]

If the SSD were a problem, then I would turn the MacBook into a desktop with an external SSD. I suspect that SSDs in general will outlast the useful life of the system unless you're using your MacBook as a Postgres server.

While I don't think SSD longevity is enough of a concern to worry about, it is worth mentioning that all Apple Silicon Macs use the internal storage to boot, even if set to boot off an external drive. As such, a failed SSD means that the Mac is useless.
From this Apple document:

If a user chooses to boot from external media, that operating system version must first be personalized using an authenticated reboot from recoveryOS. This reboot creates a LocalPolicy file on the internal drive that’s used to perform a trusted boot from the operating system stored on the external media.

 

[pshufd]

While I don't think SSD longevity is enough of a concern to worry about, it is worth mentioning that all Apple Silicon Macs use the internal storage to boot, even if set to boot off an external drive. As such, a failed SSD means that the Mac is useless.
From this Apple document:

SSDs fail gracefully though. So you'd lose space over time as sectors are remapped and later lost. Plenty of time to take action if that happens.

 

[belvdr]

SSDs fail gracefully though. So you'd lose space over time as sectors are remapped and later lost. Plenty of time to take action if that happens.

I've had a few die quickly, likely from board failure. It's rare, though.

 

[pshufd]

I've had a few die quickly, likely from board failure. It's rare, though.

We're talking about dying from use though. Not board failure.

I just added a spare T-3 to my Studio. It's going to get the 2 TB Crucial SSD and I'm undecided about getting a 4 TB SSD. I like to get as much RAM as I can reasonably use but most people are fine with 8 GB. I have a friend that bought a base mini and he was running a YouTube channel creating video and running live streams and he used it for other purposes and it was all good. He recently upgraded to an M2 Air 16/512 and is very happy with that too.

 

[colinsky]

Hi,
I closed ALL apps (Tab + Q) except for the finder, and the Window server task went down from 4,62 GB to 4,43 GB.. so actually nothing changed. Also Swap was still more than 4GB.
Now I restarted my Mac and the Window server is around 200MB big. Also 0 Bytes swapped.

I did not know it is good to restart the Mac from time to time. I literally never turn the Mac off, I appreciate to just open the screen and start working.

I reboot a lot more with my 16/512 m1 Mini. WindowServer gets huge, and kernel_task, and Finder, and normal operations put memory pressure into the yellow. Luckily with the m1 the reboot takes only 30 seconds.

 

[TheSl0th]

Hi,
I closed ALL apps (Tab + Q) except for the finder, and the Window server task went down from 4,62 GB to 4,43 GB.. so actually nothing changed. Also Swap was still more than 4GB.
Now I restarted my Mac and the Window server is around 200MB big. Also 0 Bytes swapped.

I did not know it is good to restart the Mac from time to time. I literally never turn the Mac off, I appreciate to just open the screen and start working.

I’ve seen this widow manager memory usage on an identical model - M1 8/512. The machine kept beachballing for no obvious reason - running the available software updates at that time fixed the huge window server usage, but I suspect that might just have been a result of a restart. IMO that window server usage is an anomaly and likely a bug.

 

[Geohord]

Virtual machines require lots of RAM because of the overhead. Unless each VM has 1GB of RAM or so.

 

[maflynn]

Simple solution to swap space - rebooting. That will clear that and ram out. Clearly the ram is insufficient for how you're using the laptop

 

[Toutou]

I did not know it is good to restart the Mac from time to time. I literally never turn the Mac off, I appreciate to just open the screen and start working.

It shouldn’t be. I don’t turn mine off either, my uptime is usually since the last update, and WindowServer doesn’t do this to me.