ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[Maximara]

So only after 1 year after purchase I found out the issue and have 135+ TBW. There lots of people who even doesn't know about that.

But what is the Percentage Used line showing you? 0%, 1% or something insane? This is a problem with a. lot of these posts - they report one part of the data but not the other parts which show how serious this is. A 135 TB out of a 1350 life time TBW (assume 10%) would mean your SSD wouldn't reach 100% for 10 years total.

 

[ctjack]

A 135 TB out of a 1350 life time TBW (assume 10%) would mean your SSD wouldn't reach 100% for 10 years total.

Yeah, all of that very interesting to discuss, but all that lifetime numbers mean nothing, unless Apple officially stated otherwise. Also, my Mac have written 8TB for the last 15 days since my first/last post. Is there any valid reason to write that much even if SSDs were immortal?

 

[Maximara]

Yeah, all of that very interesting to discuss, but all that lifetime numbers mean nothing, unless Apple officially stated otherwise.

Apple also hasn't officially stated what the TBW for the internal SSD is so you have to trust what data the program is telling you - all of it.

Also, my Mac have written 8TB for the last 15 days since my first/last post. Is there any valid reason to write that much even if SSDs were immortal?

What were you doing during that time? Using any programs that used Rosetta 2? Updated any programs? Used something like Chrome which is a RAM hogging disk writing nightmare. Is the OS totally vanilla with nothing left over from previous updates? (This caused me some headaches until I did a clean install - evidently something from an earlier system was causing flaky behavior). There are so many variables that finding out what is causing the write is akin to using a Magic 8 ball combined with a Tarot Deck.

One thing I did early on was turn off Time Machine's "Back up automatically" function because it will generate little snapshots on the drive you are booting from (tmutil listlocalsnapshots / in Terminal will show these)

 

[ctjack]

Apple also hasn't officially stated what the TBW for the internal SSD is so you have to trust what data the program is telling you - all of it.

I can recheck TBW numbers from "Activity Monitor" app and disk tab of it. Numbers are identical to smartctl. It is just RAW numbers, that doesn't need any extra judgement over it.

When it comes to "life used/left" then my 512gb clocks in at 4000TBW according to smartctl(2% used), and the member above reported 75% of life used for his 256gb SSD from drivedx. On top of that, there is no Macos built-in place to check warrantied/maximum TBW allowed number.

So not all numbers are made equal.

What were you doing during that time? Using any programs that used Rosetta 2? Updated any programs?

Well I've done exactly the same thing that i did on my previous rMBP 13 2012, 2020 Lenovo Legion 17" - work in Safari for Macs, have webapps in browser open to manage my email inbox, running MS Teams desktop client locally, couple Zoom meetings over the week, watching streaming websites to watch my movies, open pdf/excel/word docs. That is totally it. I don't think I am doing something critical/offensive to make it write 8TB. I mean i only have 380GB of data stored on my ssd and I am not adding anything to it myself. Have no TM backups set.

I set up laptop from scratch no backup when first purchased. It came with BigSur so i clicked 3-4 times and now i am on latest Monterey. Again, I had no problems with my old MBP on Sierra/High Sierra, and I have OTA updated it 10 times and it never slowed down nor needed restart once in 3-4 days. I just want the similar experience.
It handled all my needs well, it is new M1 is faster and buggier at the same time.

If i wanted to do reinstalls, then I would have probably kept the Win Lenovo laptop. If i wanted to catch bugs then i would also stick with win machines.

 

[osplo]

Well I've done exactly the same thing that i did on my previous rMBP 13 2012, 2020 Lenovo Legion 17" - work in Safari for Macs, have webapps in browser open to manage my email inbox, running MS Teams desktop client locally, couple Zoom meetings over the week, watching streaming websites to watch my movies, open pdf/excel/word docs. That is totally it.

Well, some users reported issues with Teams in this very thread.

In general, anything labeled Microsoft is something I avoid like the corona, but I (have to) use Office in my M1 with no (apparent) trouble.

You may understand that some software may misbehave under Rosetta 2 and even a high number of webapps may cause swapping. I really don't think that it is anything inherently wrong with the M1 per se, but I acknowledge that some users may experience quite a number of writes because of that.

Still, as you may see in this very thread, most calculations reveal that the SSD should live more than most of us. If you have to use Teams and the Mac keeps swapping like hell, well, you have to do the math, but frankly I do believe that the SSDs will exceed the (rather conservative) life expectancy based on... well, the discussion and data provided in this very thread.

Keep asking Microsoft to release a native version of Teams and please read the recommendations about keeping the tabs and webapps under control in this very thread.

 

[ctjack]

Keep asking Microsoft to release a native version of Teams

Yeah that is the tricky part. I had no problems with Windows items on Macs (except limited functionality of Excel) because I came here in 2014, when the Windows problems on a Mac was a thing of the past.
My 2012 MBP worked fine with Teams and Windows et al., but now it is not working well under Rosetta. So I don't know who is at fault here: Apple with its' faulty Rosetta or MS Teams with their native x86 app which behaves ok on non-M1 Macs?

 

[osplo]

Yeah that is the tricky part. I had no problems with Windows items on Macs (except limited functionality of Excel) because I came here in 2014, when the Windows problems on a Mac was a thing of the past.
My 2012 MBP worked fine with Teams and Windows et al., but now it is not working well under Rosetta. So I don't know who is at fault here: Apple with its' faulty Rosetta or MS Teams with their native x86 app which behaves ok on non-M1 Macs?

Well a bit of both maybe but... if there are hundreds of apps that work pretty well on M1 (even some that are non native and even many that are iPad apps) and there are a couple that don't... I think the app developer is to blame.

But don't trust me, I have a love and hate relationship with Microsoft. Without the love part.

 

[Maximara]

I can recheck TBW numbers from "Activity Monitor" app and disk tab of it. Numbers are identical to smartctl. It is just RAW numbers, that doesn't need any extra judgement over it.

When it comes to "life used/left" then my 512gb clocks in at 4000TBW according to smartctl(2% used), and the member above reported 75% of life used for his 256gb SSD from drivedx. On top of that, there is no Macos built-in place to check warrantied/maximum TBW allowed number.

As I pointed out sometime before x% ranges from x.5% to (x+1).49999...% So that 2% could be anything between 1.5% to 2.499999...%; this make the range for 80 TB = 2% as 2,666.66 TBW (low-end) to 5,333.33 TBW (high end)

Well I've done exactly the same thing that i did on my previous rMBP 13 2012, 2020 Lenovo Legion 17" - work in Safari for Macs, have webapps in browser open to manage my email inbox, running MS Teams desktop client locally, couple Zoom meetings over the week, watching streaming websites to watch my movies, open pdf/excel/word docs. That is totally it. I don't think I am doing something critical/offensive to make it write 8TB. I mean i only have 380GB of data stored on my ssd and I am not adding anything to it myself. Have no TM backups set.

MS Teams and Zoom have been noted as having high CPU usage on Intel Macs which may be translating into disk writes on M1.
Though it could be also be due to third party hardware issue:
* "Kernel_task 1000% CPU and USB webcam usage" ("In my case the problem was fixed changing the usb-c connector")

In general, anything labeled Microsoft is something I avoid like the corona, but I (have to) use Office in my M1 with no (apparent) trouble.

As I said some time ago back in the late 80s we had a joke at my university:

User: I'm having a problem with my Mac.
IT: What is the problem?
User: Well I am using Microsoft...
IT: Stop right there. That is your problem.

Looks like that is still true today.

Yeah that is the tricky part. I had no problems with Windows items on Macs (except limited functionality of Excel) because I came here in 2014, when the Windows problems on a Mac was a thing of the past.
My 2012 MBP worked fine with Teams and Windows et al., but now it is not working well under Rosetta. So I don't know who is at fault here: Apple with its' faulty Rosetta or MS Teams with their native x86 app which behaves ok on non-M1 Macs?

Given what various Apple Communities threads say I would put the blame on Microsoft.

* "zoom causing kernel_task to use more than 1000%"
* "Microsoft Teams and Zoom cause kernal_task to use lots of CPU and make my system unresponsive"
* "kernel_task up to 1000% CPU consumption when doing video conference with MS Teams"

Heck, Microsoft' coding its so wonked that the version of Windows for ARM runs nearly twice as fast as a virtual machine on the M1 then it does on the ARM chips Microsoft designed it for and didn't have x64 ready until 2021 even though Windows 10 on ARM came out July 15, 2015 and it gets worst.

"Microsoft's official developer toolchain is quite bad on Arm. Microsoft doesn't provide Arm versions of Visual Studio, VS Build Tools, or even just Microsoft Visual C++; they expect Arm developers to cross-compile C++ software on an x86 host or emulate x86 software." - Why Windows isn't ready for Arm developers (February 7, 2022)

Some other examples of Microsoft not only dropping the ARM ball but tripping over it:

"Another disadvantage of Windows for Arm is no OpenGL or Vulkan support. Even if you set up a cross-compile toolchain, you are out of luck if your application uses Vulkan. If you have an OpenGL application, Microsoft's suggestion is to use ANGLE to translate OpenGL to DirectX."

"By comparison, Arm support for developer tools on macOS and Linux is much better. GCC, Clang, and Python are readily available for Arm on these operating systems and work great. You can download native versions of these developer tools and compile them natively with one device, and it works exactly as one would hope. "

"Microsoft's message is clear: If you want to support our new Arm Windows platform, you have to use our proprietary APIs."

 

[Pedro1223]

I just wanted to share, after almost one year of use the are my reported stats from smartTBW:

So nothing awful, what I have done is keep it up to date, installed monterrey, try to minimize the use of non-native apps, use Opera with tab suspend (I do open a lot of tabs rn like 60), don't use teams app, use teams in Opera and after the update I rarely see swap being more than 1gb (usual work day is 40-60mb).

 

[Maximara]

I just wanted to share, after almost one year of use the are my reported stats from smartTBW:

View attachment 1960615

So nothing awful, what I have done is keep it up to date, installed monterrey, try to minimize the use of non-native apps, use Opera with tab suspend (I do open a lot of tabs rn like 60), don't use teams app, use teams in Opera and after the update I rarely see swap being more than 1gb (usual work day is 40-60mb).

It is reports like this that lead me to the conclusion that it isn't mainly an Apple problem (Safari can have issues with some sites so that is partly on Apple) but with other software being run on the M1 Mac and other factors. As I have said and will keep saying - if it was entirely Apple's fault then everybody (or at least the majority) that checked would be reporting the problem.

Which brings me around to the Percentage Used line which some people want to ignore even through the other data produced by the same tools appears to be correct. Why is that data suspect and the TBW not? They both are using Apple's system hooks. Accepting one but not other is a total non sequitur.

 

[Thistle41]

I just wanted to share, after almost one year of use the are my reported stats from smartTBW:

View attachment 1960615

So nothing awful, what I have done is keep it up to date, installed monterrey, try to minimize the use of non-native apps, use Opera with tab suspend (I do open a lot of tabs rn like 60), don't use teams app, use teams in Opera and after the update I rarely see swap being more than 1gb (usual work day is 40-60mb).

OK, interesting, so am I correct in guessing this is a 16GB model?

 

[jdb8167]

OK, interesting, so am I correct in guessing this is a 16GB model?

I should update smartTBW to add a note about total RAM.

 

[ctjack]

if it was entirely Apple's fault then everybody (or at least the majority) that checked would be reporting the problem.

So do you mean that everyone should use Opera and activate tab suspend? And run Teams from a Browser? I think this doesn't look like an Apple way of doing things. Why would I activate tab suspend?
Also the member above(Pedro1223) didn't share their RAM. I am sure that it is 16GB and with 16GB you would have less TBW anyways.

 

[jdb8167]

So do you mean that everyone should use Opera and activate tab suspend? And run Teams from a Browser? I think this doesn't look like an Apple way of doing things. Why would I activate tab suspend?
Also the member above didn't share their RAM. I am sure that it is 16GB and with 16GB you would have less TBW anyways.

I've been doing node.js development on a 16 GB M1 MacBook Air and I haven't run into any memory issues. I do run the node.js stack on an Intel Mac with VMWare though. But all the dev tools are running locally. I also have MS Teams, Word, VS Code, BBEdit, Fork (Git client), terminals, Safari, and Mail all open at the same time. I do quit Teams when I'm not in contact with the remote team.

I currently have about 4.5 GB of swap used and another 4.8 GB of compressed memory but so far it has been very smooth and responsive.

 

[Maximara]

So do you mean that everyone should use Opera and activate tab suspend? And run Teams from a Browser? I think this doesn't look like an Apple way of doing things. Why would I activate tab suspend?
Also the member above(Pedro1223) didn't share their RAM. I am sure that it is 16GB and with 16GB you would have less TBW anyways.

I've been doing node.js development on a 16 GB M1 MacBook Air and I haven't run into any memory issues. I do run the node.js stack on an Intel Mac with VMWare though. But all the dev tools are running locally. I also have MS Teams, Word, VS Code, BBEdit, Fork (Git client), terminals, Safari, and Mail all open at the same time. I do quit Teams when I'm not in contact with the remote team.

I currently have about 4.5 GB of swap used and another 4.8 GB of compressed memory but so far it has been very smooth and responsive.

The thing is disk swap is not the only source for large disk writes. You can have plenty of RAM but if the program makes calls to kernel_task and has it write to the SSD like a manic (a problem some programs have shown) it will not stop the excessive disk writes because those particular disk writes have nothing to do with swap.

Apple can only do so much. It cannot directly stop badly third party written code from doing something dumb like hogging the CPU or going write happy on the SSD even if you have insane amounts of RAM.

M1 MacBook SSD and Docker case in point. In the test between the M1 MacBook Air (512GB, 16GB RAM) and an Intel Core i9 MacBook Pro (i9-9980HK CPU @ 2.40GHz) the M1 had less writing to the SSD:

 

[Pedro1223]

OK, interesting, so am I correct in guessing this is a 16GB model?

No, it is an 8GB 512SSD.

 

[Maximara]

No, it is an 8GB 512SSD. View attachment 1960851

So you have had this M1 8GB 512SSD for a year and have only 15.2 TB written to it. This kind of proves my point that something else outside of Apple's control is causing the excessive writes that are being reported by some people.

 

[ctjack]

use Opera with tab suspend (I do open a lot of tabs rn like 60), don't use teams app, use teams in Opera

Just tried Opera after installing it: speedometer 254(close to 272 under Safari) and i am sold when i saw pop-up youtube. Will be moving to it.

 

[Thistle41]

No, it is an 8GB 512SSD. View attachment 1960851

Oops, I stand corrected!

Your disk is twice the capacity of mine will affect the %used but there is no denying the TBW figure. So, my new purchase of an 8/256 M1 MacMini is showing very much fewer writes to the SSD. Essentially the same install base but there are more odds and ends on the MacMini as historically the origins of that are older than my M1 MacBook Air.

So, I will compare the two machines and remove from the MBA all those apps that are not on the MacMini for a start as the MBA is still beavering away at 400GB over 5 days and this is after applying all those tips shown at the start, closing the FF browser and doing a Lock Screen at end of the day.

 

[Pedro1223]

Just tried Opera after installing it: speedometer 254(close to 272 under Safari) and i am sold when i saw pop-up youtube. Will be moving to it.

Sorry I meant Opera GX, as it lets me control the ram usage better. Same YouTube pop up there.

 

[mr_roboto]

MS Teams and Zoom have been noted as having high CPU usage on Intel Macs which may be translating into disk writes on M1.

That is a crazy theory. Why would high CPU usage on Intel Macs translate to high disk writes on M1? How would that even work, in your mind?

Given what various Apple Communities threads say I would put the blame on Microsoft.

* "zoom causing kernel_task to use more than 1000%"
* "Microsoft Teams and Zoom cause kernal_task to use lots of CPU and make my system unresponsive"
* "kernel_task up to 1000% CPU consumption when doing video conference with MS Teams"

None of that (or the rest of your rambling anti-microsoft rant) has anything to do with disk writes. CPU is not disk.

I don't really see the point in absurd speculation when we pretty much know what was going on, and have known for a long time.

#1: Big Sur shipped with a virtual memory bug which caused it to be far too eager to swap under light memory pressure. This also affected Intel Macs, but people noticed it first on M1 since the OS and the hardware launched at basically the same time. That coincidence made it look like something might be up with the new hardware, when it was actually the new software.

#2: Base model M1 Macs have 8GB RAM, and a large number of users run enough software which uses enough memory to cause significant swapping on an 8GB config. (This is of course equally true on all 8GB Intel Macs.)

#3: Lots of people use Google Chrome, and it does some bad things. For example, if you watch a video on Youtube or some other video streaming services, it might choose to write all the video data to disk instead of just using RAM. (Safari only buffers video in RAM.) Chrome is also a notorious memory hog, and using too much RAM causes swapping.

#4: (my opinion, this is not based on data) M1 SSDs are so fast that swapping doesn't always make the computer feel slow. As a result, many users simply don't notice when their M1 is swapping quite a bit, do nothing about it, and are eventually shocked to find how much data has been written to the internal SSD.

On #2 and #3: The youtuber (https://www.youtube.com/c/ConstantGeekery) who did some user surveys trying to research the causes of excessive data written on M1 systems found that the 8GB RAM config was the biggest predictor (pointing the finger at swap as the primary issue), and use of Chrome was the second biggest. 8GB Chrome users had it much worse than anyone else.

 

[Maximara]

That is a crazy theory. Why would high CPU usage on Intel Macs translate to high disk writes on M1? How would that even work, in your mind?

High CPU usage can (but not always) translate to high disk writes. For example, I had a program that had high CPU cycles but I also looked at the disk writing to see what it was doing because I regarded this a sign of poor coding and lo and behold it was writing to my platter HD like crazy.

The two don't necessarily go hand in glove but one can be indications of bad programming and that is also a source of unneeded SSD writes.

#2: Base model M1 Macs have 8GB RAM, and a large number of users run enough software which uses enough memory to cause significant swapping on an 8GB config. (This is of course equally true on all 8GB Intel Macs.)

#3: Lots of people use Google Chrome, and it does some bad things. For example, if you watch a video on Youtube or some other video streaming services, it might choose to write all the video data to disk instead of just using RAM. (Safari only buffers video in RAM.) Chrome is also a notorious memory hog, and using too much RAM causes swapping.

Actually Safari has had issues and will write to disk then dealing with poorly written sites which is I gave instructions on how to turn off its disk cache. I have noted the Chrome issue myself as well.

#4: (my opinion, this is not based on data) M1 SSDs are so fast that swapping doesn't always make the computer feel slow. As a result, many users simply don't notice when their M1 is swapping quite a bit, do nothing about it, and are eventually shocked to find how much data has been written to the internal SSD.

Not just M1 SSDs. As I mentioned back on May 8, 2021: "As for this only being a Big Sur/M1 problem read SSD wear leveling count at 90% after 7 months Neither existed in 2014."

On #2 and #3: The youtuber (https://www.youtube.com/c/ConstantGeekery) who did some user surveys trying to research the causes of excessive data written on M1 systems found that the 8GB RAM config was the biggest predictor (pointing the finger at swap as the primary issue), and use of Chrome was the second biggest. 8GB Chrome users had it much worse than anyone else.

Sadly the same problem that was true back in Explorer days is happening again - weird browser behavior (likely caused by people writing to the browser rather than to HTML in general - Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6; Chrome-only sites are a problem Jan 4, 2018). Here is the same page (Safari on the left, Firefox does work but still)

 

[ctjack]

On #2 and #3: The youtuber (https://www.youtube.com/c/ConstantGeekery) who did some user surveys trying to research the causes of excessive data written on M1 systems found that the 8GB RAM config was the biggest predictor (pointing the finger at swap as the primary issue), and use of Chrome was the second biggest. 8GB Chrome users had it much worse than anyone else.

Now this totally clears my questions: when I earlier mentioned watching videos for entertainment, I didn't mention that i use chrome(because it has good free adblock) to watch YT and stream movies only. That and add 8gb of RAM = we have what we have, the "worse than anyone else" numbers.

 

[Maximara]

Now this totally clears my questions: when I earlier mentioned watching videos for entertainment, I didn't mention that i use chrome(because it has good free adblock) to watch YT and stream movies only. That and add 8gb of RAM = we have what we have, the "worse than anyone else" numbers.

I now use Safari with the ABP (AdBlock Plus) extension and aside for a few urls it works very well. As I mentioned before I also view YouTube videos at 200 p (a hold over from when my internet was DSL) and that also cuts down on any cache Chrome was doing before I finally dropped it (it is the worst browser you can use per chart below). Safari still has a few artifact issues but not as much as when 14.x was around.

 

[harshw]

I believe the high SSD usage is inversely proportional to the RAM on the M1 MacBooks. They seem to write a lot to disk when going to sleep or suspending. Of course BigSur had the swap bug which has now been (mostly) resolved. I really doubt it has anything to do with Microsoft or anything that the weirdo armchair conspiracy theorists are peddling on the forum ...

I've been tracking my 64GB M1 Max Pro MBP. Haven't really had a chance to use it - it sleeps most of the time and it doesn't seem to cross 30 GB/day. I will be starting to use this machine for development (VS 2022 + .NET MAUI) from next month, will update then with GB/day figures