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ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written
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But these are part of the skills one needs to build their own PC which is what the video in question was about.
Macs are easy to use and I again say that for the $10,000 basically went bye bye when the same thing could have been down M1 MacBook Pro which was (and is) £2,598.99 with a 2 TB SSD, 16GB unified RAM and Final Cut Pro. If the poor guy already had a monitor and keyboard then a M1 MacMini with a 2 TB SSD, 16GB unified RAM for £1,998.99.
Tying that into the old PC would have been saner (and cheaper) then what that poor sod went through. Sure you can get "cheaper" with PC but as the old adage goes "you get what you pay for" never mind if you factor in the time need to get the PC to work you are not likely saving any money because as another adage goes "time is money".
I must have come in after that video. First time I've heard about it.
I built a big system for about $2,500 to do what I need, power four high-resolution display, and run two programs that run poorly on M1.
You can get some serious hardware for $2,500 at pre-pandemic prices. A lot of components these days are hard to get or way over MSRP.
My two cents, after five months my SSD is almost a virgin.
I never log out or restart, my MBA 16/1TB is on 24/7. Zoom is not a problem. Happy customer here.
I never log out or restart, my MBA 16/1TB is on 24/7. Zoom is not a problem. Happy customer here.
I took a peek. It was fine. I uninstalled the monitor program and will just live without worry. This system only has to last until the M1X comes out. My wife will get it then and she does far less than I do. My guess is that she will use under 8 GB of RAM on average.
had mine for 6 and 1/2 months, seldom off, seldom restart, data written at 2.36TB
I find it suspect that people say, "hey! since it's not a problem for me, it's not a problem!," simply due to reasons of brand loyalty, totally worthless posts.
It's absolutely a problem that needs addressing. Not affecting everybody doesn't mean it's not a significant problem. 11.4 made significant improvements, but it's still not good enough. I have to go through quite a bit of rigamarole to keep my SSD writes donw to acceptable on a base model M1 air. There are certain programs/conditions which cause basically a kernel excessive write condition where it's needlessly writing and writing in the background, and I can't have powernap=1 without waking up to 100gb written while the computer is "sleep" mode. That's not acceptable long term.
That said, I'd still recommend the computer; it's fantastic. It doesn't really bother me that I have to monitor what's going on, it might need a reboot etc, but then again it's not my main PC which is adesktop recent generation AMD processor with 32 gb of ram. But I'm the exception on tech level familiarity, not the rule.
The reason I bought this computer was that it was powerful - I wouldn't have to hassle with it; they need to make improvements to their OS, which I'm sure they eventually will. It's not a problem for me, so others must be exaggerating, is just totally worthless and inept of a "contribution." It's good that you Mac fanboys for lac of better term spend too much on gear and demand perfection, imho you should. Keep on keepin' on.
It's absolutely a problem that needs addressing. Not affecting everybody doesn't mean it's not a significant problem. 11.4 made significant improvements, but it's still not good enough. I have to go through quite a bit of rigamarole to keep my SSD writes donw to acceptable on a base model M1 air. There are certain programs/conditions which cause basically a kernel excessive write condition where it's needlessly writing and writing in the background, and I can't have powernap=1 without waking up to 100gb written while the computer is "sleep" mode. That's not acceptable long term.
That said, I'd still recommend the computer; it's fantastic. It doesn't really bother me that I have to monitor what's going on, it might need a reboot etc, but then again it's not my main PC which is adesktop recent generation AMD processor with 32 gb of ram. But I'm the exception on tech level familiarity, not the rule.
The reason I bought this computer was that it was powerful - I wouldn't have to hassle with it; they need to make improvements to their OS, which I'm sure they eventually will. It's not a problem for me, so others must be exaggerating, is just totally worthless and inept of a "contribution." It's good that you Mac fanboys for lac of better term spend too much on gear and demand perfection, imho you should. Keep on keepin' on.
Sooo I was one of the people who received some pointed comments for saying that I had problems with excessive disk writes, but I didn't think anyone was critical for reasons of brand loyalty. Rather, I got the feeling people were reacting strongly because they had me pegged as one of those people who goes wringing his hands when his battery integrity drops to 98% or there's a tiniest of scratches on his phone. Plenty of those people exist, right? There's a long history of people who come here to freak out about ordinary wear and tear.
While some people read a bit too much into what I said, I don't feel like I received excessive abuse for being concerned. Like you, I'm simultaneously very impressed by the M1's and also concerned that for my purposes, it might be a good idea to head back to the sidelines for a bit longer.
I used to be a systems engineer and one of my responsibilities was to diagnose complex problems involving multiple systems. And we had standard processes and tools but it often came down to tools + process + artistry.
If you have excessive writes, then diagnose the problem. Try your programs alone, one by one, and find the programs that result in excessive writes. I think that we've determined that this is NOT a widespread problem. Since the vast majority can't reproduce the problem, then someone who can reproduce it either has to demonstrate it to someone who can do something about it or the individual customer has to do some of the diagnostic work to show to Apple.
I have brought crash dumps to the Genius Bar to show them the component of the device having the problem.
What do you expect those of us that can't reproduce the problem to do?
That's impressive!
My disk writes have gone down substantially since 11.4. They are now about 50-80GB per day, which is fine for my usage.
However, there are things that will rapidly affect it.
Yesterday, I opened a broken web application (Service Now console if anyone is interested), which had a tab that was just "spinning its wheels". I left it alone to see if it would resolve, and tried another browser - same results. I forgot about the open tab for a couple of hours until I noticed sluggishness opening Chrome web pages...so, I checked the memory usage in activity monitor....
22GB of swap used ( memory usage nearly all in the "brown" with a couple of short red peaks). One tab in Edge browser (presumably the "broken" app) showed 33GB memory usage (virtual obviously). Wow.
I check the Disk bytes written....2.9TB since reboot yesterday...yuk! Bear in mind that I normally used 50-80GB a day, so the broken web app had forced massive usage of virtual memory (22GB swap used)...and led to lots of disk writing - about 2.7-2.8TB within a couple of hours.
Throughout the entire history of this thread I have seen one consistent thing:
If you use lots of swap, then you will write a lot to the disk. It doesn't appear to be linear. Most of the time I'm using 3-8GB of swap (I have 16GB/512GB Mini). If swap usage increases to over 10GB I start to see more disk writes.
That's my opinion. There's more than enough data in Activity Monitor to point to any excessive caching to the internal SSD. Unlike the Butterfly Keyboard, Radeon dGPU which eventually resulted in extended warranty amongst others. The excessive writes to the internal SSD are a factor of SW usage and it behoves the user to do some basic investigations as to the cause.
As said if you don't have the issue, just what do people expect. Install SW that I know will be an issue on OS X and has a history of the same? Personally I look into new SW before I install on either OS X or Windows, as a result I have no issues on either platform across spanning across HW from just over 6 months ago to over a decade of use.
I'll likely wait on M2 and 2nd Gen of the next physical MBP redesign as there will likely be significant changes to the hardware and Apple doesn't always get it right first time around.
Q-6
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That is a misreading of what is being actually being said: "hey! since it's not a problem for me, it's not Apple's problem but something else!"
If it was a problem with the brand it would be happening across the board to everyone. But it isn't and that is the real issue. It is NOT brand loyalty but basic common statistical sense and understanding what the numbers are actually saying.
Too many people have gone 'ahh x TB has been written to the SSD in y number of days there is a major problem. Apple needs to fix this' even when the percentage used from the same freaking tool sits at "0%".
It is akin to the Crime Clock where x number of crime occur every x seconds is used to justify more police funding but when you look as per capita (per 1000) you find out crime has actually gone down...even in places that haven't seen an increase in funding.
If you look at the majority of people saying there is an issue it is on the level of President Eisenhower who was concerned half of the American people were below average intelligence or that the assumption that since life expectancy (which is also an average) in the past was x everyone dropped dead at age x ignoring the fact that that low average was due to high death rates in the 0-5 age range.
Fomalhaut's recent post show that as I said a long time ago odds are the problem wasn't entirely with Apple but something else. In Fomalhaut's case is was ServiceNow going off and going crazy and I said a looong time ago that some of the write issues were likely due to badly written programs.
Who knows what other programs people have running on their Macs that are writing to the SSD like a drunken sailor. When one can pinpoint it being Safari doing something crazy fine that is Apple's problem but when we are given no idea on what programs are being uses than how can it be Apple's problem when we don't know what is causing the excessive SSD writes?!
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There was a bug in Chromium two years ago. I was trying to run iCloud Notes in a browser on Windows and tried Chrome, Edge, Opera and Brave and they all had the same bug. It would start out around 800 MB and stay there for about a day and then it would gradually use up to 13 GB of RAM. I would restart and then same thing over again. Eventually it was fixed in Edge but not the others but I assumed that it's fixed in Chromium now as that's how Open Source is supposed to work.
Why didn't I run it on Firefox? Firefox has bugs with Notes as well. It doesn't get highlighting to work correctly in large documents. Notes isn't really viable if you have a lot of them and some really large ones, outside of iOS and macOS.
I do wish that all browsers allowed you to put resource limits on tabs.
This is a problem you have to look for to notice, however. And it's a problem for Apple because it occurs on their system, that is to say running the same software in different environments does not produce the same unacceptable results.
Whatever they did with 11.4 was a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done, which I'm confident they will. Don't use certain software is not an acceptable solution.
Whatever they did with 11.4 was a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done, which I'm confident they will. Don't use certain software is not an acceptable solution.
@bojan233. Thanks for that comment. I'm not helped at all by folk saying that their system is doing just fine without any way of knowing what they are doing or not doing to get that result. At my calculation, I will have 7.3 years warranted lifetime from the SSD if it is the 1600TBW spec at the rate of 0.6TBW/day and assuming I had that from day 1 which I didn't.
For the record, I'm running:
macOS 11.4 (20F71)
Kernel Version: Darwin 20.5.0
...with nothing exotic, no dev kits nor more than 2 hrs/mth Zoom meetings. A bit of YouTube and general web browsing and website dev (WordPress).
I've installed Auto tab discard, turned off the cache all on FF89.0.1.
It is a wonderful machine and will keep it as long as it lasts...... but how long will that be?
For the record, I'm running:
macOS 11.4 (20F71)
Kernel Version: Darwin 20.5.0
...with nothing exotic, no dev kits nor more than 2 hrs/mth Zoom meetings. A bit of YouTube and general web browsing and website dev (WordPress).
I've installed Auto tab discard, turned off the cache all on FF89.0.1.
It is a wonderful machine and will keep it as long as it lasts...... but how long will that be?
We actually don't know that. That Service Now problem could very well occur on Windows systems too.
Changing your software is always a rational consideration. We call that capitalism.
if the problem was showing up on every single MacBook Air M1, regardless of how that M1 is used, then you would know that it is an Apple problem. that is not the case, the problem is only showing up in a small % of the M1's, therefore it is not an Apple problem. what that problem is is not fully known, at least not yet, but one would think that it is related to other programs that are not designed for use on the M1, or the user is trying to use the M1 in ways that it is not designed for.
if you bought a 2021 F150 Ford pickup, and every F150 Ford pickup with the same specs had the same exact problem, then you could say that it was a Ford problem. but if you are adding after market equipment, changing the rev limiter, installing different types of exhaust, fuel injectors, or changing the timing, the problem you are encountering is user created, not Ford's problem.
how many casual users of the M1 who do the basic computer things, like; email/text/browsing/YouTube/music/basic games, how many of these users have any of these problems? I haven't heard one single casual user talk about any of the problems that are being discussed.
if you bought a 2021 F150 Ford pickup, and every F150 Ford pickup with the same specs had the same exact problem, then you could say that it was a Ford problem. but if you are adding after market equipment, changing the rev limiter, installing different types of exhaust, fuel injectors, or changing the timing, the problem you are encountering is user created, not Ford's problem.
how many casual users of the M1 who do the basic computer things, like; email/text/browsing/YouTube/music/basic games, how many of these users have any of these problems? I haven't heard one single casual user talk about any of the problems that are being discussed.
My other machines are windows and linux... there's nothing I can do to them for them to randomly start writing half a terabyte per day like my macbook air was in my first few weeks of use, before 11.4 and the other mitigation measures I took.
Casual users, by definition, wouldn't notice the problem - which is convenient, because that's the m1 target audience, for now.
Again, 11.4 was a step in the right direction, but there's more to be done which I fully expect subsequent improvements with OS updates or they're going to see large numbers of angry customers a few years down the road.
Casual users, by definition, wouldn't notice the problem - which is convenient, because that's the m1 target audience, for now.
Again, 11.4 was a step in the right direction, but there's more to be done which I fully expect subsequent improvements with OS updates or they're going to see large numbers of angry customers a few years down the road.
that's basically what I have said in previous posts, the M1 target audience was designed for the casual user who also might do low end video editing. it seems the power users are the ones who are experiencing the problems. those who want to own a car that performs like a dodge hell cat shouldn't buy a chevy volt and then complain about it's lack of performance.
You can turn off page and swap in Windows and macOS. I'm not sure about Linux. That would likely solve the writes problem but it could cause running programs to crash.