Under memory pressure, MBA beach balls for a minute when plugging/unplugging USB. Why?

[johannnn]

I have a M1 MBA with 8GB RAM, and it's crazy how good it is with just 8GB RAM.
I have ~100 Safari tabs and all other random apps open (Mail, iMessage, Calendar, Reminders, iTunes, Notes, etc). I literally don't notice any slow down at all.
However, as soon as I do something with the USB slots, it starts to beach ball for like a minute. This can be both pluggin/unplugging the charging cord, or plugging/unplugging a USB mouse.
This is 100% related to high memory pressure. If I recently rebooted the machine, or only have a few apps open, there is no beach ball at all when I plug/unplug something.

Does anyone know why this is happening? I'm curious why using the USB slots causes this behavior in high memory pressure situations.

 

[satcomer]

Did you transfer all your older applications? An older Mac app may not be compatible could cause the beachballs! so if you did that might be the problem also check the startup pane!

Plus if you still have something open from the drive on your Mac? Did you both to unmount your drive before unplugging it?

 

[jdb8167]

I have a M1 MBA with 8GB RAM, and it's crazy how good it is with just 8GB RAM.
I have ~100 Safari tabs and all other random apps open (Mail, iMessage, Calendar, Reminders, iTunes, Notes, etc). I literally don't notice any slow down at all.
However, as soon as I do something with the USB slots, it starts to beach ball for like a minute. This can be both pluggin/unplugging the charging cord, or plugging/unplugging a USB mouse.
This is 100% related to high memory pressure. If I recently rebooted the machine, or only have a few apps open, there is no beach ball at all when I plug/unplug something.

Does anyone know why this is happening? I'm curious why using the USB slots causes this behavior in high memory pressure situations.

Next time you are in that situation you should look at the Disk tab in Activity Monitor. It’s possible that the eject code isn’t resident in memory when under high memory pressure. That means the system might have to do fair amount of swap to get everything to run. If so you should see a spike in the disk I/O.

 

[johannnn]

Did you transfer all your older applications? An older Mac app may not be compatible could cause the beachballs! so if you did that might be the problem also check the startup pane!

I transferred nothing. And I only have Apple's built-in software installed.

Plus if you still have something open from the drive on your Mac? Did you both to unmount your drive before unplugging it?

I'm not talking about an external drive. I'm plugging/unplugging the charger cord or a wired mouse.

 

[jerryk]

I wonder if you are very close to running out of available memory and when you plug in the mouse another driver is loaded. Same with the power cable. If you leave it plugged from the start does it happen?

 

[xraydoc]

I wonder if you are very close to running out of available memory and when you plug in the mouse another driver is loaded. Same with the power cable. If you leave it plugged from the start does it happen?

I'm pretty certain this would be the case. As drivers get loaded and unloaded, in a high memory pressure situation, something unused needs to be swapped to the SSD first, then the driver can get swapped, then the data swapped back in to RAM from SSD.

Since you say it happens only when memory pressure is high, it all comes down to swapping data back and forth to/from the SSD.

 

[Kung gu]

mmm weird. It should not do that. My 16" MBP does not beachball. Honestly wait for a new update or reinstall macOS

 

[TIOATIOA]

Same issue here with MBP M1. Happens when plugging/unplugging usb-c power. It’s ridiculous at this point. I felt certain it was a known issue and would be resolved in a system update at some point, but I feel like we are way overdue for a fix.
I most notice the issue when I have dozens of safari tabs open, but it’s also a time-related problem. I can restart, open Safari with reopening 100 tabs, and performance is normal. A couple hours later, the problem is apparent. I don’t think it’s *just* the memory load, but likely to do with Safari’s swap file behavior with tabs. This happens to be causing tremendous SSD reading/writing as noted in another thread here.

This is a horrible bug that needs squashed. The MacBook becomes unusable when it happens. There is no good reason that adding or removing usb-c power should have this affect. It has zero to do with mouse drivers or external hard drives etc as mentioned above.

 

[alexe]

I'm having the exact same issue, also on an M1 MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM. Really annoying, I'm growing increasingly unhappy with my otherwise great M1 because of this problem.

Almost every time I plug or unplug the power cord or my USB hub, everything freezes up for minutes (spinning wheel of death). We're not talking a few seconds here, we're talking >1 minutes until everything is back to normal. It's such a productivity killer, puts me in a bad mood every time. Sometimes I just force-restart the machine because that's actually slightly faster than waiting for the damn thing to get its act together.

I also instantly thought this might be connected to memory pressure, since I'm at >90% memory usage almost all of the time and the freezing doesn't happen just after a restart or when I have only non-memory-hungry apps running, same as the OP observed. I also usually have dozens of Safari tabs open, often more than a hundred. I haven't tested it systematically, but it might well be that something related to Safari could be a major part of the problem here.

However, if the issue were only related to memory swap, I don't understand how it can take so long. A spinning wheel for a few seconds would seem plausible to me, but not for minutes. MacBooks have crazy-fast SSDs and how much stuff can the system possibly need to swap when I unplug the power cable? It surely can't be more than a few tens of megabytes, can it? How would that take longer than a second or two?

 

[jterp7]

i dont have this issue (yet knock on wood) and my devices are connected to a hub which is connected to the official apple hdmi usb digital av thing.

Occasionally i do have the weird waking from sleep issue where all my hds will unmount and the mac screams at me for not unmounting properly though.