M1 iMac running out of memory

[Ledgem]

I have similar use to yours, and my 16Gb M1 iMac certainly does have to juggle it's resources more than my intel iMac with 24GB RAM. (According the Activity Monitor)

But at no point is the M1 showing any visible signs of struggling - not stuttering, no fans, no beachballs, slowdowns, etc.

So, what does it matter that the memory pressure is higher..? As long as the job gets done...

So far at all times the M1 always feels faster to use, despite having less RAM.

(Okay I do admit that it'd be nice to know I could put more RAM in if I ever needed it - but I think those days are now gone with Apple.)

Maybe it matters to you, maybe it doesn't.

You're not noticing slowdowns because the standard disk access is very fast - likely 4-40x faster than what you were using previously, depending on what you upgraded from. So if your computer needs to move data from the RAM to the SSD and back again, it's not as noticeable. That used to be a beachball-inducing event in the past.

But shuffling data between your SSD and RAM is still not as fast as keeping everything in the RAM. And it's more wear and tear on your SSD.

If you're not noticing the impacts and you're not counting the seconds on your workflows then you're right, maybe it doesn't matter for you. Most people probably won't have their computers long enough to ever encounter a worn out SSD even with the increased activity between RAM and SSD, either. It's an added strain on the system that wouldn't be occurring if there were more RAM available, and the question is really whether that added strain will impact you or not.

 

[phrehdd]

Forgive my language - Safari on M1 Mini running Big Sir SUCKS. I get the most ridiculous numbers showing up with only MacRumors opened and then a warning on top and my page locks up until I refresh it and then it clears the memory (cache).

This warning about memory resources is out of our control. We should be able to limit what Safari does as far as how much memory is being used. I have extensions for 1Password and Grammarly and DuckDuckGo Privacy Dashboard.

This is truly terrible. Seems all the web browsers have issues of one type or another and we should expect Apple to do a bit better given their software is on their OS.

 

[ZebedeeG]

Forgive my language - Safari on M1 Mini running Big Sir SUCKS. I get the most ridiculous numbers showing up with only MacRumors opened and then a warning on top and my page locks up until I refresh it and then it clears the memory (cache).

This warning about memory resources is out of our control. We should be able to limit what Safari does as far as how much memory is being used. I have extensions for 1Password and Grammarly and DuckDuckGo Privacy Dashboard.

This is truly terrible. Seems all the web browsers have issues of one type or another and we should expect Apple to do a bit better given their software is on their OS.


View attachment 1809135

Something's up - I'm only using about 280MB for this site... (iMac M1, Safari, same tab open for a few days)

 

[phrehdd]

Something's up - I'm only using about 280MB for this site... (iMac M1, Safari, same tab open for a few days)

If I reload the page, it releases the memory for the most part. It is not always an issue but comes up often enough. Again, I think that Safari should have the means to limit any caching it does. It is ridiculous for an M1 with 16gig to choke on a normal website such as MacRumors.

 

[ZebedeeG]

If I reload the page, it releases the memory for the most part. It is not always an issue but comes up often enough. Again, I think that Safari should have the means to limit any caching it does. It is ridiculous for an M1 with 16gig to choke on a normal website such as MacRumors.

Sadly I'm not technical enough to know the solution... 🤔

It's not a problem I've encountered for a while on any of my machines (though it has happened in the past). They are all clean installs of Big Sur, with my files downloaded from iCloud & apps reinstalled from the App Store or their own website. I don't know it that makes any difference.

 

[fathergll]

Well this is one reason I won't be upgrading to ARM or Big Sur anytime soon. I'll be sticking to Intel and pre Big Sur releases until they work out the bugs.

 

[ZebedeeG]

Well this is one reason I won't be upgrading to ARM or Big Sur anytime soon. I'll be sticking to Intel and pre Big Sur releases until they work out the bugs.

Last version of MacOS (or rather OSX at it then was...) which I really can't remember having much in the way of "bugs" was Snow Leopard...

But perhaps that's just nostalgia! 😏

That said I do find I don't experience too many problems if I hold out until a new release has had a couple of updates before downloading, then do a clean install.

 

[boswald]

If I reload the page, it releases the memory for the most part. It is not always an issue but comes up often enough. Again, I think that Safari should have the means to limit any caching it does. It is ridiculous for an M1 with 16gig to choke on a normal website such as MacRumors.

Might be a stupid question, but what the hell: Would an ad-blocker cut down on the memory usage? Or, perhaps, using a different one? I have only 8gb of RAM with the AdGuard standalone app running, and never saw that error yet. Nor have I noticed anything odd in Activity Monitor. Chrome, for example, is known to use a crap ton of RAM, but this is the first I’ve read anything about Safari doing that.

 

[Ethosik]

Might be a stupid question, but what the hell: Would an ad-blocker cut down on the memory usage? Or, perhaps, using a different one? I have only 8gb of RAM with the AdGuard standalone app running, and never saw that error yet. Nor have I noticed anything odd in Activity Monitor. Chrome, for example, is known to use a crap ton of RAM, but this is the first I’ve read anything about Safari doing that.

It’s also dependent on what ad shows. Lots of animations? That uses more resources.

 

[wilberforce]

Something's up - I'm only using about 280MB for this site... (iMac M1, Safari, same tab open for a few days)

I agree, something is up. Never used more than 1GB for Macrumors, and I don't use any ad blockers. The most I have used for any site is about 3GB (mapping sites), even with a 64GB Intel machine. Even a 32GB Intel machine will start choking with 23.7GB used for a single site.
There is another issue going on

 

[primarycolors]

I don't want to jinx it, but I updated to Big Sur 11.5 last night and it seems to have improved RAM management immensely.

Under my heavy use there's still swap happening but not nearly as much as before, and the pressure's managed to stay mostly in the 'green' zone even with several large apps (Illustrator, iMovie, Logic).

As an aside, I'm pretty sure I did the right thing switching from my 27" with 32GB RAM. Even when it's under pressure, the computer's fully responsive and that's what matters to me—more than a line being in a 'green' or 'yellow' zone. My 27" with 32GB RAM would hang and stutter like mad under this same workload.

 

[Apfelblüte]

I'm on 11.5 and Safari shows 1.53 GB of RAM usage with just macrumors opened. I have Wiper and Dark Mode running.

 

[thingstoponder]

I'm on 11.5 and Safari shows 1.53 GB of RAM usage with just macrumors opened. I have Wiper and Dark Mode running.

The Safari process itself or the www.macrumors.com process?

 

[Apfelblüte]

Safari itself, measured with istat menus.

 

[thingstoponder]

That sounds way high for Safari itself but not crazy for the website. What does Activity Monitor say? I’m guessing istat is combining both numbers? I’m not familiar with it.

 

[Ethosik]

Logged out of this website (where I will get ads), Google Syndication and service worker.js do a lot of work and it causes the RAM to increase significantly. It depends on the ad too, sometimes its only a couple hundred MB for me, I have seen it get to 1GB of RAM on just this website before.

This also depends on the content on the page too. Does a forum post have a lot of pictures or videos? Or is it all text based? All these things make an impact on RAM usage. We cannot say "site worked fine yesterday but now I get 1GB of RAM usage". Websites are dynamic these days.

And this is on a Windows machine with Chrome.

 

[fathergll]

Last version of MacOS (or rather OSX at it then was...) which I really can't remember having much in the way of "bugs" was Snow Leopard...

But perhaps that's just nostalgia! 😏

That said I do find I don't experience too many problems if I hold out until a new release has had a couple of updates before downloading, then do a clean install.

Heh some nostalgia that is. Usually the big upgrades along with hardware will show issues. When I jumped on the 5k iMac when it first came out it was incredibly buggy(slow) and took Apple probably 6-8 months to update Yosemite to really fix it.

 

[Apfelblüte]

That sounds way high for Safari itself but not crazy for the website. What does Activity Monitor say? I’m guessing istat is combining both numbers? I’m not familiar with it.

exactly, it's displaying it as one process, not splitted.

 

[phrehdd]

Just an opinion - web pages should not control our browser apps or monopolize enough RAM to cause issues. This is not a product of the web page that is stuffed full of items but poor implementation of the browser app and possibly the OS. I can go to Facebook and get the memory warning then everything goes to crap. This happens more so when I have a couple of other tabs engaged as well. One would think that browsers would do a bit better and if needed, not engage the entire web page that is causing the excessive fill of RAM. Apple should do better with Safari. Chrome as well as Firefox and others too should allow user control over this and enough so that maybe the idiots behind those overdone web pages will get a clue when the hits become less frequent.

 

[phrehdd]

So I am on less than 2 minutes with only email and TextEdit open.

Would someone kindly explain to us all why Safari is being a piece of nasty work? There are times I get that memory warning and Safari freezes up or pauses and at worst, blows out that particular web page entirely.

 

[bughuntr]

Maybe I missed it somewhere in all the post on this thread, but I have been having a LOT of crashes on my M1 Mac Mini and narrowed it down to specific web sites that use Node.js. Which is a major bummer as I code with Node.js and it's used all over the web now.
Almost all the logging I did seemed to related back to node.js web apps or processes. It was especially bad on my system as I have node.js installed for development work as well. It turns out you have to follow a specific install process on M1 Macs to avoid some issues with Node.js. But most websites aren't worried about this.
I did a test and disabled Javascript, and that fixed the problem very quickly, but it also broke almost all the websites I was using 😂
If you are using any apps that use node.js under the hood this could also be causing a problem.
In any case, this looks to be an issue with javascript and node.js somewhere. If I figure more out I'll post here and elsewhere.

 

[phrehdd]

Maybe I missed it somewhere in all the post on this thread, but I have been having a LOT of crashes on my M1 Mac Mini and narrowed it down to specific web sites that use Node.js. Which is a major bummer as I code with Node.js and it's used all over the web now.
Almost all the logging I did seemed to related back to node.js web apps or processes. It was especially bad on my system as I have node.js installed for development work as well. It turns out you have to follow a specific install process on M1 Macs to avoid some issues with Node.js. But most websites aren't worried about this.
I did a test and disabled Javascript, and that fixed the problem very quickly, but it also broke almost all the websites I was using 😂
If you are using any apps that use node.js under the hood this could also be causing a problem.
In any case, this looks to be an issue with javascript and node.js somewhere. If I figure more out I'll post here and elsewhere.

I have noticed the web browsing issue as related to memory usage popup and also the pages freezing up when using Safari. Memory Diag util also shows pages that eat up resources quickly. This is really disappointing that Apple doesn't acknowledge or address this issue. They are also silent on the monitor problems as well.

 

[Golden373]

I have a 16gb imac M1, and am also seeing regular "low memory" errors.

Watching this thread.

 

[phrehdd]

I have a 16gb imac M1, and am also seeing regular "low memory" errors.

Watching this thread.

Much of this problem went away when I went over to Chrome browser. Seems Safari with both Big Sur and Monterey Beta has this issue.

 

[ADGrant]

Maybe I missed it somewhere in all the post on this thread, but I have been having a LOT of crashes on my M1 Mac Mini and narrowed it down to specific web sites that use Node.js. Which is a major bummer as I code with Node.js and it's used all over the web now.
Almost all the logging I did seemed to related back to node.js web apps or processes. It was especially bad on my system as I have node.js installed for development work as well. It turns out you have to follow a specific install process on M1 Macs to avoid some issues with Node.js. But most websites aren't worried about this.
I did a test and disabled Javascript, and that fixed the problem very quickly, but it also broke almost all the websites I was using 😂
If you are using any apps that use node.js under the hood this could also be causing a problem.
In any case, this looks to be an issue with javascript and node.js somewhere. If I figure more out I'll post here and elsewhere.

The Javascript on webpages runs on the browsers Javascript interpreter, not on Node.js even if you have it installed.