Struggling 2018 mini

[ashleykaryl]

You raise a number of good points. Regarding that absurdly high level of ram being used by the finder, I have only seen that once and over the last few days it has fluctuated between 200mb and 800mb. It's sitting at 205mb as I type this and the computer is feeling generally smooth.

Something that seems to be helping a lot is using Brave rather than Safari as the primary browser. Brave seems to use just as such ram, however it doesn't cause the fans to race or affect the overall performance nearly as much. I just wonder if Safari is now set up in a way that benefits silicon over Intel...

I have tried all sorts and more or less come to the conclusion this mini struggles to run a 4K display with scaling enabled, so it doesn't take much else to render it flustered and struggling. That, perhaps along with some oddities in Sonoma all point to leaving Intel behind and switching to Silicon fairly soon. Affinity Photo also seems to cause problems.

If you can work with a 2K display this Intel is still quite usable for many purposes. Adding a separate eGPU would actually make this a pretty capable performer, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense financially in 2024 and adds some complication to the set up.

My basic plan is to wait it out for WWDC to get a better sense of what is happening, then likely buy a mini with 16 gigs of ram and a 512 drive. I'll use that for a year or so, then move to an M4 pro or max that should see me right for 5+ years.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote in reply 51 above:
"then likely buy a mini with 16 gigs of ram and a 512 drive. I'll use that for a year or so, then move to an M4 pro or max that should see me right for 5+ years."

Hmmmm.....
From the overall gist of this thread, you had better make that 32gb of RAM and a 1tb SSD...

 

[The_Interloper]

I have tried all sorts and more or less come to the conclusion this mini struggles to run a 4K display with scaling enabled, so it doesn't take much else to render it flustered and struggling.

This was also my experience (which I mentioned earlier in the thread). The integrated graphics can only use system RAM and only up to 1.5Gb. It's simply not enough for 4K+scaling, resulting in super choppy performance.

 

[ashleykaryl]

When it is bad I also find the mouse cursor can become a real pain and difficult to position as well.

There is a curious development though that I am monitoring. Yesterday I had full fibre fttp broadband installed after years of being stuck with fttc. Some wifi / power line issues have resurfaced but since changing the broadband I have not seen one byte of swap ram 🤷‍♂️

 

[macguru9999]

I read some of this..... back up your work and wipe then clean install osx Monterey. Try it with both 2k and 4k displays ..... see what happens... sonoma is not your friend ..... if its ok then either try upgrading again or jus buy an m2 mac mini... cheers

 

[ashleykaryl]

I agree Sonoma is not my friend and I think Ventura was the high point with this mini, though that was before adding the display. Unfortunately it isn't realistic running Monterey because of various software I need. I think it's just going to be a case of muddling along for a month or so, then grabbing a silicon computer.

 

[Bigwaff]

Regarding that absurdly high level of ram being used by the finder

How to work around Monterey’s Finder memory leak

If you’re not careful, you can end up watching the Finder steadily eating your Mac’s memory until it grinds to a halt. The bug explained with solutions.

eclecticlight.co

Why Monterey’s Finder Find memory leak may not be fixed

Will Monterey 12.5 fix the memory leak in the Find feature in the Finder? That looks increasingly unlikely, and may influence your decision as to whether to upgrade.

eclecticlight.co

 

[Boyd01]

That memory leak info is interesting, however (according to the article) it only affects the "find" feature (which I use very rarely)...

"If you never ever use the Finder’s Find feature, then you can stop reading here, as you won’t encounter this bug."

 

[bzgnyc2]

You raise a number of good points. Regarding that absurdly high level of ram being used by the finder, I have only seen that once and over the last few days it has fluctuated between 200mb and 800mb. It's sitting at 205mb as I type this and the computer is feeling generally smooth.

Something that seems to be helping a lot is using Brave rather than Safari as the primary browser. Brave seems to use just as such ram, however it doesn't cause the fans to race or affect the overall performance nearly as much. I just wonder if Safari is now set up in a way that benefits silicon over Intel...

I have tried all sorts and more or less come to the conclusion this mini struggles to run a 4K display with scaling enabled, so it doesn't take much else to render it flustered and struggling. That, perhaps along with some oddities in Sonoma all point to leaving Intel behind and switching to Silicon fairly soon. Affinity Photo also seems to cause problems.

If you can work with a 2K display this Intel is still quite usable for many purposes. Adding a separate eGPU would actually make this a pretty capable performer, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense financially in 2024 and adds some complication to the set up.

My basic plan is to wait it out for WWDC to get a better sense of what is happening, then likely buy a mini with 16 gigs of ram and a 512 drive. I'll use that for a year or so, then move to an M4 pro or max that should see me right for 5+ years.

Can't advise on the tradeoffs of a disposable Mac Mini M2 versus an eGPU. It's hard for me to buy a computer as a disposable item. I can't help but spend a lot of me time before I am satisified with any new computer so the switching costs end up being high. I sense that is a me thing though...

Also, I wouldn't be happy with less than an M2 Pro as I wouldn't want to drop to 2 Thunderbolt/USB-C. And since RAM is not upgradable, wouldn't want to commit to 8 or 16GB forever, even though I get by with that now, so I would want 32GB. And then an M2 Pro with 32GB of RAM doesn't feel disposable at all.

In any case with your memory problems at bay, it seems your choices to address remaining sluggishness are Mac Mini M2, eGPU, new monitor(s) (smaller, bigger, 5K, etc), or going to 2X scaling. I bring up the last one as it's the cheapest option and I've heard that 1.5x scaling is noticable slower than either native or 2X scaling on the Mac Mini 2018. However, not sure that would be usable for you/make things too big/etc.

A Mac Mini M2 will run 2-3x on the straightaways (CPU-bound, especially multiprocessor stuff) in addition to much better graphics than the Mini 2018's Intel 630. Pretty much anything is a leap forward over that.

P.S.Another browser you might consider is Orion. Based on the same WebKit engine as Safari but the author isn't quite so quick to eject support for old hardware/OS. Still in beta though. Otherwise Firefox has gotten surprisingly quick. And has some of the best options for adblock/etc extensions, which seem minimum these days as even the most seemingly basic sites are hidden tarpits for your browser (which then can't help but take along the rest of your system).

 

[ashleykaryl]

The point you raise about the M2 missing the two extra USB-C ports is a good one and that would require some juggling to manage, since I already struggle with four ports and have to make use of a couple hubs.

I normally run a Mac for around 6 years and in the case of my previous Mac Pro it lasted 9 years, through targeted upgrades in ram, SSD and graphics card. I bought this current mini with a certain resignation, knowing that it was going to have a shorter useful lifespan with silicon likely coming at some point soon, but no other information.

At the time I figured that silicon machines would likely be expensive, possibly not that much faster and I also envisaged a messy transition, having gone through the previous switch from PPC to Intel. As it turned out they were cheaper, considerably faster and the transition was relatively smooth. It's easy to forget now and kick myself, but the Mac Pro was becoming unusable with a number of key apps in 2020, so I could not afford to wait and find out.

My focus now is on what will happen with AI and I hope we will all have a better idea after WWDC. From what I have read on various websites, the M4 chips will be optimised for on device generative AI, so I really don't want to spend big now on something M2 or M3. The idea was to have a fairly basic M2 I can sell or pass on to my father in 12 months time, then likely jump on an M4 Mac Studio and be set for several years. I'm not doing anything though until we have at least some insight from WWDC.

For the browser I'm finding that Brave appears to be a pretty decent option, especially with the built in adblocking that seems to work seamlessly and effectively without breaking anything.

 

[carylee2002]

I have a 2014 and 2018 Macmini and I use Firefox vs Edge. I find Edge to a be a power hog and have turned it off as a startup using CCleaner Free under tool and disable it and then dumping it. But after any upgrades it gets added again. So I repeat the process. But Edge to me is useless program and Firefox does the job for me. This using my machine as Windows 10 machines only. It may be also true if your running it as MacOs but this is my observations.

 

[ashleykaryl]

No doubt some browsers are worse than others for hogging resources. I just ran a test and Firefox does seem a bit less thirsty, so that is worth consideration.

In terms of workflow I keep coming back to the graphics card on this computer just being a bit gutless and in fairness this was cited when they were first released. Last week somebody sent me half a dozen 16-bit tif files to retouch and the mini just about imploded. After half an hour of retouching on the first file I had to restart the computer when the app had become unresponsive.

The next day I connected it to the old 2K display and while it didn't fly like a rocket it was far more manageable. My old 2010 Mac Pro wouldn't struggle to edit those files on a 4K display, but the big difference is that I added a 4K dedicated graphics card some years ago.

The way I see it, this mini is adequate with a 4K display if all you do is some web browsing, email and some light tasks in Numbers etc. For anything more demanding there are three options:


1) Drop back to a 2K display

2) Add an eGPU as many have found (faster but not always straightforward)

3) Switch to a silicon Mac.


This is the i7 mini with loads of space on the drive and I have 32 gigs of ram, so if it is constantly failing with a 4K display it all points to the built in graphics card just not being adequate for real work. I also suspect there are changes in the OS ram management that have been tweaked for silicon and intel has been hung out to dry.

 

[carylee2002]

I use a egpu with a xt 6700 card..and to give u a different a scale compare, with that card, I could run 85% of the current games vs only 30% with the stock video gpu. My specs is I7-8700B, 32 gb ram using windows 10 with a sonnet 750 egpu. There is a small bottleneck via the usb3 to egpu conversion, but I'm glad I upgraded to egpu for my setup. You can find used ones a pretty good prices now days since the M chip came out. But I prefer intel minis because of bootcamp.

 

[ashleykaryl]

I have no doubt it makes a big difference, however I would be wary of the the potential update headaches. The only card I have is the RADEON RX 560 that was purchased years ago to enable metal on the old Mac Pro. I've also heard that some eGPU solutions are noisy, though I don't know if that is true.

If I needed Bootcamp and access to Windows this would obviously be the option to consider, but there is nothing I need that cannot be done on a Mac. The real problem would start if I had to work on Windows, since some of my key apps are Mac only.