M1 massiv problems: 700GB drive usage each day, stuttering music and much more

[Elektronenhirn]

Hello to all M1 users,

I have my Mac mini (16gb) for about a week now, and it is horrible. The Mac is connected to one 4K screen and one FHD screen. I am using Chrome, Safari, Zoom, Tidal and sometimes PyCharm and Xcode.

If I start one or two Xcode simulators, my sound starts stuttering for some seconds. PyCharm is also unusable. Scrolling in 300 lines Code or in a database with about 60k lines is not possible(verrryyy laggy). But that is probably an issue of pycharm, I tried the Apple Silicon beta but there were too many packages not working... Each day I can see in the activity monitor that about 600-700gb where read & written to my drive. But there are also days with only 20-50gb. Sometimes the screensaver (it is disabled) starts on itself while using the mac. I can not enter my password and in the background everything is still opened. The music plays, I can write but I simply do not see anything because of the screensaver....

A friend of mine has the MBP with 8gb memory. He only uses zoom, safari and Chrome. His experience are also horrible. Every two days, the MB crashes and is unusable. The 8gb memory are completely full and in the activity monitor, the memory is "red". But this is absolutely random. His drive usage is very similar, if not even worse. He doesn't use any demanding software.

Does anyone else facing that kind of issues?

 

[Marty_Macfly]

Hi E,

Really sorry to hear about your issue there.

you may want to read about the issues other people of experience on this forum.

I think I read it somewhere here, that there was an issue with chrome being a real memory hog et cetera.

That might be a good place to start.

Perhaps Start taking away one app at a time, do a full reboot each time, and see how it goes.

Once the Mac is working as expected, it may very well be the very last app removed!

Regards
Martin

 

[casperes1996]

What I’m missing from this post is what each individual process’ memory usage is like. It sounds like a memory leak, so figuring out the responsible process would be the first step of diagnosing the issue

 

[Marty_Macfly]

Thinking about it, the same thread talked about the issues with actually fully removing chrome properly.

The same thread, gave a link to instructions on how to fully remove the app.

Hope all this helps

Martin

 

[Elektronenhirn]

What I’m missing from this post is what each individual process’ memory usage is like. It sounds like a memory leak, so figuring out the responsible process would be the first step of diagnosing the issue

Here you can see the top ones (Mini and MBP):





If chrome would be the problem, why is the high usage on kernel_task? Is swapping only managed through the kernel?

 

[Gnattu]

Here you can see the top ones (Mini and MBP):
View attachment 1698098

View attachment 1698099


If chrome would be the problem, why is the high usage on kernel_task? Is swapping only managed through the kernel?

Memory paging is an essential function for modern OS. So yes, swapping is only managed through the kernel, and this is by design. If any user-space program have the privilege to change the memory paging than it will be a serious problem. Such high swap usage does not happen to me even with lots of VM usage, there is definitely something leaking memory on your machine, and you should check the "Memory" tab to find out which app is requesting most RAM.

 

[casperes1996]

Here you can see the top ones (Mini and MBP):
View attachment 1698098

View attachment 1698099


If chrome would be the problem, why is the high usage on kernel_task? Is swapping only managed through the kernel?

Could I perhaps get it for memory rather than disk usage? Disk usage will muddy the data with non-memory related reads and writes.

As for the possibility of Chrome related issues;
There has been various speculation of this. The theory I trust the most at the moment is that an issue with Chrome’s auto-updating tool during the service’s startup causes leakage or a infinite run-loop in kernel space before the program ever even gets launched.

There’s a René Ritchie on the subject

 

[casperes1996]

I still consider the reasoning somewhat speculative, but here

 

[Quackers]

Have you contacted Apple Support? Something is wrong there.

 

[Elektronenhirn]

@Gnattu @casperes1996 @Quackers @Marty_Macfly
Thank you for your help.

Here is a screenshot of my memory usage. But I don't see anything unusual here. On my 16gb Mac mini, the ram usage was NEVER higher then 12gb. When does the Mac starts swapping? That a 8gb Mac is swapping more then a 16gb makes sense. But here it doesn't makes any difference. My 2011 MBP with 4gb and a 2016 MBP with 8gb with the same usage doesn't has that high drive usage. When my music is stuttering, the memory usage is also between 10-12gb.

@Quackers
Not yet. I am trying to find a solution here before contacting them.

Removing chrome is the next step for me, if we can not find any other solution/reason. Maybe that would also me a new thing for the chrome debate?

@All If you are using chrome on your M1-Mac: Can you please share your memory and drive usage 🙂 If chrome is the problem, there have to be more people with that high drive usage.

 

[alien3dx]

@Gnattu @casperes1996 @Quackers @Marty_Macfly
Thank you for your help.
View attachment 1698115
Here is a screenshot of my memory usage. But I don't see anything unusual here. On my 16gb Mac mini, the ram usage was NEVER higher then 12gb. When does the Mac starts swapping? That a 8gb Mac is swapping more then a 16gb makes sense. But here it doesn't makes any difference. My 2011 MBP with 4gb and a 2016 MBP with 8gb with the same usage doesn't has that high drive usage. When my music is stuttering, the memory usage is also between 10-12gb.

@Quackers
Not yet. I am trying to find a solution here before contacting them.

Removing chrome is the next step for me, if we can not find any other solution/reason. Maybe that would also me a new thing for the chrome debate?

@All If you are using chrome on your M1-Mac: Can you please share your memory and drive usage 🙂 If chrome is the problem, there have to be more people with that high drive usage.

my windows laptop pretty high ram usage for google chrome. I have disabled task scheduler for chrome.
Im not sure disable hardware acceleration will improved the performance in chrome m1 but it works on intel version.

Seem the image you shown high sync image ? maybe icloud ? Xcode not much memory usage compare android studio but anything come from jetbrain consume a lot of ram. For me , sometime i used vscode instead unless i needed.

 

[Bug-Creator]

I still consider the reasoning somewhat speculative, but here

Towards the end he suggests "fixing" the problem by replacing the Google-browser with one from MicroSoft.

Sick burn.

 

[casperes1996]

Here is a screenshot of my memory usage. But I don't see anything unusual here. On my 16gb Mac mini, the ram usage was NEVER higher then 12gb. When does the Mac starts swapping? That a 8gb Mac is swapping more then a 16gb makes sense. But here it doesn't makes any difference. My 2011 MBP with 4gb and a 2016 MBP with 8gb with the same usage doesn't has that high drive usage. When my music is stuttering, the memory usage is also between 10-12gb.

Swap is a complicated system on modern machines and is not purely based on free memory and memory used/requested. It also involves the frequency and urgency of the access patterns. I.e. if you have something in memory that is nearly never accessed swapping it to disk will have no impact on performance, and the OS knows this. It also knows how much data is read at once from memory and disk so it can optimise the operations; If loading A also always results in loading B, C and D, and A is useless unless B, C and D is also loaded, it may be able to store B on disk instead of memory with 0 impact on performance as well, since the operations can be pipelined so B is read from disk while A, C and D are manipulated in memory. - And all of this is not just tiered between memory and disk but also with compressed memory.

You cannot read the disk usage tab of Activity Monitor and equate it to Swap. For Swap, see the actual swap section under Memory. In your screenshot it says Verwendeter Swap 0 byte; That's the field to look at. The Disk tab will include all reads and writes not necessarily relating to memory.

Towards the end he suggests "fixing" the problem by replacing the Google-browser with one from MicroSoft.

Sick burn.

Chrome has never been great on resource utilisation, but what's reported in René's video, many other places and potentially this issue along with it, is above and beyond just lacking optimisation and points to a severe issue either in macOS' communication with the updating service or with the Chrome updating service itself.
Joking aside there's a decent chance Microsoft's Edge would exhibit the same issue since it's Chromium based, but since the issue seems to be with the updating utility and not the browser engine itself I don't know; No idea if the same updating mechanism is used.
Regardless, yeah, René often scripts in burns like that

 

[Joelist]

Actually there is no chance Edge would display the same behavior as it has been traced to Keystone, which is solely present with Google Chrome. Rene gave Edge as an example of a Chromium browser that does not use Keystone but instead uses the regular Apple path for updating.

 

[Elektronenhirn]

Swap is a complicated system on modern machines and is not purely based on free memory and memory used/requested. It also involves the frequency and urgency of the access patterns. I.e. if you have something in memory that is nearly never accessed swapping it to disk will have no impact on performance, and the OS knows this. It also knows how much data is read at once from memory and disk so it can optimise the operations; If loading A also always results in loading B, C and D, and A is useless unless B, C and D is also loaded, it may be able to store B on disk instead of memory with 0 impact on performance as well, since the operations can be pipelined so B is read from disk while A, C and D are manipulated in memory. - And all of this is not just tiered between memory and disk but also with compressed memory.

You cannot read the disk usage tab of Activity Monitor and equate it to Swap. For Swap, see the actual swap section under Memory. In your screenshot it says Verwendeter Swap 0 byte; That's the field to look at. The Disk tab will include all reads and writes not necessarily relating to memory.


Chrome has never been great on resource utilisation, but what's reported in René's video, many other places and potentially this issue along with it, is above and beyond just lacking optimisation and points to a severe issue either in macOS' communication with the updating service or with the Chrome updating service itself.
Joking aside there's a decent chance Microsoft's Edge would exhibit the same issue since it's Chromium based, but since the issue seems to be with the updating utility and not the browser engine itself I don't know; No idea if the same updating mechanism is used.
Regardless, yeah, René often scripts in burns like that

Thank you for your explanation.

Here are some recent screenshot of the M1 MBP of a friend. He rebooted it some hours ago:




So there are some GB in swap but the drive usage while doing basic work is absolute madness. How can we find out what causes the high drive usage? If this keeps going, the ssd is dead in 1-2 years? How can we be the only ones with that problem while using common software?

 

[Joelist]

Rip out Google Chrome completely using the methods Rene and others describe, then monitor and see where Reads and Writes stand. If they drop back to normal then that was the cause - if not something else is afoot.

 

[casperes1996]

Rip out Google Chrome completely using the methods Rene and others describe, then monitor and see where Reads and Writes stand. If they drop back to normal then that was the cause - if not something else is afoot.

Also if it’s still a very new machine with a lot of iCloud Drive data on the account we could be seeing the effects of syncing and indexing at play as well, but definitely try this out, yeah

 

[Elektronenhirn]

Now it is official!
Read more about it here:

M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

Over the past week, some M1 Mac users have been reporting alarming SSD health readings, suggesting that these devices are writing extraordinary...

www.macrumors.com