My Intel iMac is doing the same thing. When will you all stop isolating this just to the Silicon chip? It's Big Sur!
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ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written
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Stop guessing. It could be the Boogie Man for all we know. It's a Big Sur Big Flop.
Your numbers are consistent with mine: if you multiply swapin page number to 16k page size you get bulk of write activity (ca 1.5Tb), i.e. most of writes are coming from constant swapping.
Ahaha)) I've posted my stat for five days, and it's only 444 GB (smartmontools)
Hello everybody
Sorry for my bad English, I am using translator DeepL.
I have a Mac mini since 1 month ago, and from the beginning I was obsessed by the TBW issue, since I had bought 256Gb which usually is 150TBW, my idea was also to use Paralells to virtualize Windows and Linux and play some video games occasionally.
As the price of Apple upgrades seems excessive to me, I decided for the 16Gb/256Gb configuration and also decided to buy a thunderbolt 3 enclosure and a 1Tb WD Black ssd.
The first few days I checked the activity monitor and used the demo version of DriveDx, and I started to notice that there was excessive disk writing, which did not seem justified to me.
I expected only writes from installing applications, downloading files, and some swap and temporary files from watching YouTube videos or Netflix.
I searched the internet about the problem but only saw several specific posts about excessive kernel writes on OSX but it didn't seem to refer to the M1.
Finally, I have started to find news and references regarding this problem, and I see that it was not my paranoia.
In my case, I can say that with a normal use of browsing, watching Apple TV+ series, Netflix and Youtube.
Some programming with IntelliJ, writing documents with Word.
With a use of about 8-10h daily I saw that were 15Gb-20Gb approximately depending on the day, although there were two interesting tests that show that the higher the load to the M1 higher writings to the ssd.
One day I made 4 or 5 screencast videos with the iPad, about 7-12 min each, and then passed them to the Mac Mini to edit them with iMovie, and adjust it to the screen and put an initial presentation screen to the video. Little thing in my opinion, because with this, OSX made 40 Gb!!! of writes to the ssd.
Another time I put Paralells with Windows 10 arm, with a configuration of 8Gb, and installed Visual Studio, in 1h of time approximately, 120Gb were written to disk, of which about 40Gb are of the installation of Visual Studio, but the rest was swap.
I for the moment, until a solution to the problem is not glimpsed, I will use my external ssd as boot disk which is not a problem since it has a read and write speed very close to the internal ssd.
Yesterday afternoon for example, Word wrote 2Gb on disk, just to work with a 38 Mb document, really incomprehensible and absurd, although it is true that I had two or three pdf open with preview and a couple of tabs open in Safari, but it does not justify that amount.
Sorry for my bad English, I am using translator DeepL.
I have a Mac mini since 1 month ago, and from the beginning I was obsessed by the TBW issue, since I had bought 256Gb which usually is 150TBW, my idea was also to use Paralells to virtualize Windows and Linux and play some video games occasionally.
As the price of Apple upgrades seems excessive to me, I decided for the 16Gb/256Gb configuration and also decided to buy a thunderbolt 3 enclosure and a 1Tb WD Black ssd.
The first few days I checked the activity monitor and used the demo version of DriveDx, and I started to notice that there was excessive disk writing, which did not seem justified to me.
I expected only writes from installing applications, downloading files, and some swap and temporary files from watching YouTube videos or Netflix.
I searched the internet about the problem but only saw several specific posts about excessive kernel writes on OSX but it didn't seem to refer to the M1.
Finally, I have started to find news and references regarding this problem, and I see that it was not my paranoia.
In my case, I can say that with a normal use of browsing, watching Apple TV+ series, Netflix and Youtube.
Some programming with IntelliJ, writing documents with Word.
With a use of about 8-10h daily I saw that were 15Gb-20Gb approximately depending on the day, although there were two interesting tests that show that the higher the load to the M1 higher writings to the ssd.
One day I made 4 or 5 screencast videos with the iPad, about 7-12 min each, and then passed them to the Mac Mini to edit them with iMovie, and adjust it to the screen and put an initial presentation screen to the video. Little thing in my opinion, because with this, OSX made 40 Gb!!! of writes to the ssd.
Another time I put Paralells with Windows 10 arm, with a configuration of 8Gb, and installed Visual Studio, in 1h of time approximately, 120Gb were written to disk, of which about 40Gb are of the installation of Visual Studio, but the rest was swap.
I for the moment, until a solution to the problem is not glimpsed, I will use my external ssd as boot disk which is not a problem since it has a read and write speed very close to the internal ssd.
Yesterday afternoon for example, Word wrote 2Gb on disk, just to work with a 38 Mb document, really incomprehensible and absurd, although it is true that I had two or three pdf open with preview and a couple of tabs open in Safari, but it does not justify that amount.
It's interesting that I seem to not be affected by this? I got my M1 MBPro 1 week ago today and have been using it consistently for 10-16 hours a day for work.
Doing game development and working on a project that's about 50GB in size. Thinking more data might be of help to you guys in tracing down what could cause this.
In the past week I installed the following things:
- Unity3D and Visual Studio (rosetta)
- Baldurs Gate 2: EE (iOS version)
- Discord, Pock (touchbar utility), LimeChat
- XCode
- CrossOver + Steam and Skyrim to test out how crossover behaves on M1 macs.
+ 50 GB project for Unity.
In total, my read/writes look like this:
In total 418 GB written and 608 read in the time span of 1 week with 10 hours of usage / day on average and only using the software mentioned above. I use Safari as my main browser on this machine. Unity and Visual Studio Code + Safari (Youtube, docs and 3-4 more additional tabs) and Baldurs Gate constantly opened at any point.
I'm also doing regular builds of the game and spitting it out once per day (about 2 GB in size).
The amount of Data Units written is consistent with what I'm doing. If I add up together the file sizes for what I downloaded + MacOS default install size + ~4GB / day the amount of units written it ads up.
So I'm not experiencing this issue myself on this M1. Question is why?
I'm going to go through the other posts and see if there's any specific app being mentioned (like chrome, or zoom or something) and do a test install to check and monitor the issue over the span of my work hours.
Edit: Also, I setup this Macbook as a new Mac, did not import anything from my other stuff. iCloud backing up is disabled.
P.s. I don't leave my mac in sleep mode. End of the day it gets powered off. I keep noticing people like to put it to sleep instead of shutting it down so thought I would mention this.
Doing game development and working on a project that's about 50GB in size. Thinking more data might be of help to you guys in tracing down what could cause this.
In the past week I installed the following things:
- Unity3D and Visual Studio (rosetta)
- Baldurs Gate 2: EE (iOS version)
- Discord, Pock (touchbar utility), LimeChat
- XCode
- CrossOver + Steam and Skyrim to test out how crossover behaves on M1 macs.
+ 50 GB project for Unity.
In total, my read/writes look like this:
In total 418 GB written and 608 read in the time span of 1 week with 10 hours of usage / day on average and only using the software mentioned above. I use Safari as my main browser on this machine. Unity and Visual Studio Code + Safari (Youtube, docs and 3-4 more additional tabs) and Baldurs Gate constantly opened at any point.
I'm also doing regular builds of the game and spitting it out once per day (about 2 GB in size).
The amount of Data Units written is consistent with what I'm doing. If I add up together the file sizes for what I downloaded + MacOS default install size + ~4GB / day the amount of units written it ads up.
So I'm not experiencing this issue myself on this M1. Question is why?
I'm going to go through the other posts and see if there's any specific app being mentioned (like chrome, or zoom or something) and do a test install to check and monitor the issue over the span of my work hours.
Edit: Also, I setup this Macbook as a new Mac, did not import anything from my other stuff. iCloud backing up is disabled.
P.s. I don't leave my mac in sleep mode. End of the day it gets powered off. I keep noticing people like to put it to sleep instead of shutting it down so thought I would mention this.
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Damn, my mistake, I was reading the external disk for the iMac, the Lightroom library! For that the stats was so weird. Don't know why but disk0 on the iMac now is my Samsung X5 external disk that is the same 512GB as my internal, so i confused them 😅
These are the correct info for my iMac i9/64GB/512GB after one year:
Code:
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 23 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 10%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 8,434,412 [4.31 TB]
Data Units Written: 13,316,160 [6.81 TB]
Host Read Commands: 253,456,212
Host Write Commands: 334,645,952
Controller Busy Time: 631
Power Cycles: 94,647
Power On Hours: 406
Unsafe Shutdowns: 45
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, 16 of 64 entries)
No Errors LoggedInstead my MBA M1 8/256GB after 2 months reports this (and the error in the end 🤔):
Code:
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 17 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 5,871,285 [3.00 TB]
Data Units Written: 4,360,179 [2.23 TB]
Host Read Commands: 83,265,197
Host Write Commands: 34,565,997
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 202
Power On Hours: 35
Unsafe Shutdowns: 13
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Read 1 entries from Error Information Log failed: GetLogPage failed: system=0x38, sub=0x0, code=745Someone know why the "Available Spare Threshold" reports this big difference with similar stats? 😳
Let's do some quick rough math.
418 written right now.
- 53 GB unity project
----
365 GB written left.
7 days of builds exported that are 4 GB in size, written to the drive. About 1-2 builds per day, so let's say it's 10 builds (altough it's much more than that).
365 GB
- 40
-------
325 GB written.
Baldurs Gate: 3.25 GB
Unity: 5 GB
Visual Studio: 2.5 GB
XCode: 45 GB
Skyrim (+ a lot of mods): 17 GB
-----------
72 GB.
325-72 = 253 GB.
Take away about 35 GB from the system install size and your left with about 200 GB of data that are unaccounted for. UNTIL you factor in about 80 GB of sound assets and music files for my game that I copied over to have access to when I'm on the road and about 40 GB of 2D/3D assets that I have backed up on this laptop. About 120 in total leaving us with about 100 GB unaccounted for.
And that's without factoring in all the shait I downloaded and removed over the course of the first 2 or 3 days of just fracking around with the M1 to stress test it out and benchmark it's compilation times. Seeing as people here mention 500 GB written daily and stuff like that, yeah, it ads up to my usage.
Edit: attached, how things were looking like on Day 3 (28th February). Had it archived on a discord chat, sent it to a friend.
I'm just saying, my written data is on par with what I did.
Edit: and I can account for the remaining unaccounted space written since I regenerated the vegetation storage data for my game quite a lot of times to apply the changes. It writes about 5.6 GB of space to store prefabs and vegetation data for a huge, open world. Since I was importing new vegetation types, tweaking and writing it I can safely say about 40-50 GB of writes were taken from that. I realised this now since I just started a new vegetation storage write.
418 written right now.
- 53 GB unity project
----
365 GB written left.
7 days of builds exported that are 4 GB in size, written to the drive. About 1-2 builds per day, so let's say it's 10 builds (altough it's much more than that).
365 GB
- 40
-------
325 GB written.
Baldurs Gate: 3.25 GB
Unity: 5 GB
Visual Studio: 2.5 GB
XCode: 45 GB
Skyrim (+ a lot of mods): 17 GB
-----------
72 GB.
325-72 = 253 GB.
Take away about 35 GB from the system install size and your left with about 200 GB of data that are unaccounted for. UNTIL you factor in about 80 GB of sound assets and music files for my game that I copied over to have access to when I'm on the road and about 40 GB of 2D/3D assets that I have backed up on this laptop. About 120 in total leaving us with about 100 GB unaccounted for.
And that's without factoring in all the shait I downloaded and removed over the course of the first 2 or 3 days of just fracking around with the M1 to stress test it out and benchmark it's compilation times. Seeing as people here mention 500 GB written daily and stuff like that, yeah, it ads up to my usage.
Edit: attached, how things were looking like on Day 3 (28th February). Had it archived on a discord chat, sent it to a friend.
I'm just saying, my written data is on par with what I did.
Edit: and I can account for the remaining unaccounted space written since I regenerated the vegetation storage data for my game quite a lot of times to apply the changes. It writes about 5.6 GB of space to store prefabs and vegetation data for a huge, open world. Since I was importing new vegetation types, tweaking and writing it I can safely say about 40-50 GB of writes were taken from that. I realised this now since I just started a new vegetation storage write.
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Hi,
I just created an account to comment here (long time lurker). I received a Mac Mini M1 16/256 yesterday and after reading this thread i was anxious to see how bad this problem was (my main machines are Mac Pros with maxed out RAM).
I ran quite a lot of tests since opening the box yesterday and i have some - maybe - interesting conclusions.
I'm a photographer so my workflow revolve around Hasselblad Phocus / Capture One / Lightroom+Photoshop / etc.
So far my Mac Mini seems totally unaffected when i work in Capture One (Rosetta / OpenCL), Phocus, Affinity and most of my productivity + browsing software.
However kernel_task start to write a lot of data as soon as i open Lightroom's develop module with hardware acceleration set to full. If i set it to basic or no hardware acceleration it stops right away (need further tests to confirm)
As i'm not affected when running Capture One which uses OpenCL, i wonder if the problem comes from a bad implementation of GPU acceleration + Metal with some software like the Adobe Suite.
My Mini (11.2.2) has icloud and time machine de-activated, no data on the internal drive as everything is on an external TB3 drive. The only software i have installed other than work stuff is Little Snitch.
I will try Resolve tonight and see if it's also affected.
I just created an account to comment here (long time lurker). I received a Mac Mini M1 16/256 yesterday and after reading this thread i was anxious to see how bad this problem was (my main machines are Mac Pros with maxed out RAM).
I ran quite a lot of tests since opening the box yesterday and i have some - maybe - interesting conclusions.
I'm a photographer so my workflow revolve around Hasselblad Phocus / Capture One / Lightroom+Photoshop / etc.
So far my Mac Mini seems totally unaffected when i work in Capture One (Rosetta / OpenCL), Phocus, Affinity and most of my productivity + browsing software.
However kernel_task start to write a lot of data as soon as i open Lightroom's develop module with hardware acceleration set to full. If i set it to basic or no hardware acceleration it stops right away (need further tests to confirm)
As i'm not affected when running Capture One which uses OpenCL, i wonder if the problem comes from a bad implementation of GPU acceleration + Metal with some software like the Adobe Suite.
My Mini (11.2.2) has icloud and time machine de-activated, no data on the internal drive as everything is on an external TB3 drive. The only software i have installed other than work stuff is Little Snitch.
I will try Resolve tonight and see if it's also affected.
As i did, no transferring from any other device. My Mac Mini writes approx. 10-12 GB per day on average, but all our user cases might differ, off course.
Do keep us posted! It is so refreshing to hear your case. 418 GB written and 608 GB read is really, really good.Fresh setup as a new Mac, mentioned it in my edit
It's even more than that, once you start adding a lot more stuff. Pretty sure my XCode folder is at around 120 GB on my iMac pro
.And every OS Update you gotta update XCode and most of the stuff that come with it.
Jesus ok was going to do it this evening till i saw the file size, i will download drivedx instead and add my details here ! has anyone done a comparison of drivedx then install XCode and the smart tool?It's even more than that, once you start adding a lot more stuff. Pretty sure my XCode folder is at around 120 GB on my iMac pro
And every OS Update you gotta update XCode and most of the stuff that come with it.
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Lightroom Classic, there is no use for Lightroom (ARM - Cloud) outside of an iPad Pro in a production workflow.
Very interesting report you gave above.
As I switched to Capture One Pro years ago I deleted any Adobe apps from my M1 Mac mini and so far also any Microsoft apps. I used the free EtreCheck app to clean up my M1 after using Migration Assistant. Maybe I got lucky without noticing it at the time.
That might be an explanation, e.g. legacy stuff and/or configuration params from the different architecture/configuration triggers abnormal VM subsystem behavior.Fresh setup as a new Mac, mentioned it in my edit
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Thanks. Do you have a reference for this? I would like to brush up on this. Thanks again.
I restored from a Time Machine backup from my 2018 MPR running the then-current BS beta. I have not experienced this issue. After a week I have about 800 GB written.
And then unpacking it! And then moving (or copy/pasting) it to the Apps Folder! And then deleting the .xip file! That's like 30+GB right there.
Just uninstalled homebrew, smartmotools & Xcode and it freed up around 30GB of disk space. Will install some other tool like drivedx if it's M1 native.