Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Toutou

macrumors 65816
Jan 6, 2015
1,082
1,575
Prague, Czech Republic
It doesn’t really.
It really does. I used the machine just today, did some clicking around, opened some stuff. Chrome launches on it in three seconds, Pages too. Safari launches in a second, System Preferences take around a second. It runs Word, a browser with Teams, Signal and Spotify just fine. It doesn't crash, doesn't freeze, my GF is happy with it.
But the ram is being wasted by bloat in macOS. There’s a big difference.
What bloat? How does the OS "waste" RAM? It's the processes that, sometimes, waste RAM.
 

dogslobber

macrumors 601
Oct 19, 2014
4,670
7,809
Apple Campus, Cupertino CA
It really does. I used the machine just today, did some clicking around, opened some stuff. Chrome launches on it in three seconds, Pages too. Safari launches in a second, System Preferences take around a second. It runs Word, a browser with Teams, Signal and Spotify just fine. It doesn't crash, doesn't freeze, my GF is happy with it.
I don't boot up every day so overtime Big Sur memory footprint grows. Try it.
What bloat? How does the OS "waste" RAM? It's the processes that, sometimes, waste RAM.
The macOS frameworks are bloated and that impacts long running processes that do graphical support like the kernel and Window Server. Go compare Chrome running on each of the three OS derivatives and explain why macOS is the largest. Then go compare Chrome running those same pages on El Capitan and see the difference. If you're adventurous go see the size of some of those daemons for support services running in Big Sur. It is bloated to the extreme or full of memory free bugs. Probably both.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,678
The macOS frameworks are bloated and that impacts long running processes that do graphical support like the kernel and Window Server. Go compare Chrome running on each of the three OS derivatives and explain why macOS is the largest. Then go compare Chrome running those same pages on El Capitan and see the difference.


Again, all of this is meaningless unless you are talking about a specific performance or usability issue. It is entirely possible that Cocoa and other macOS framework use more memory than whatever UI toolkit uses on Linux. It is also a fact that macOS supports features like purgeable memory which enables applications to use RAM opportunistically, and other systems do not.

If you want to argue that Big Sur uses memory inefficiently, you have to demonstrate that it will suffer from RAM starvation sooner than other systems under same usage conditions. RAM usage statistics alone do not mean anything.

If you're adventurous go see the size of some of those daemons for support services running in Big Sur. It is bloated to the extreme or full of memory free bugs. Probably both.

So what? Why wouldn't these system services use the RAM if there is plenty available? I don't follow your logic. As to "memory free bugs" — I am running my system for months without restarts. I don't see any evidence for serious memory leaks in the core system.

You mention Window Server... well, Window Server is the process responsible for drawing the application windows and compositing the final result that you see on your screen. Window Server will aggressively pre-render UI elements and cache their contents to enable smooth and efficient desktop compositing. Yes, it can end up using multiple gigabytes of RAM — if that RAM is freely available, and it's a good thing, because it means that the rendering ends up being more efficient. If you actually need that RAM for something more important, Window Server will scale down its usage. This is again the concept of purgeable memory I mentioned earlier, a good chunk of caches allocated by Window Server are purgeable.
 
Last edited:

bobcomer

macrumors 601
May 18, 2015
4,949
3,699
If you want to argue that Big Sur uses memory inefficiently, you have to demonstrate that it will suffer from RAM starvation sooner than other systems under same usage conditions. RAM usage statistics alone do not mean anything.
MacOS seems to work pretty well RAM The way I test for RAM constraint is to throw bigger and bigger RAM requests at it (more and bigger VM's is the easiest way) to see where I can't go any further. I haven't tested MacOS that thoroughly, but I've yet to see the dreaded VM failed to start because of a lack of RAM message yet, so the RAM usage numbers don't concern me at all. (My M1 has 16G of RAM and I really only use 1 VM)

I regularly see that VM can't start error on my Windows 10 laptop, as it only has 16G of RAM and I tend to use multiple VM's. I don't see that on my desktop Windows machine, it's got plenty of RAM to spare.

No comment on Linux, don't like it.
 

Lihp8270

macrumors 65816
Dec 31, 2016
1,143
1,608
S
Exactly what I was talking about.

High RAM usage points to sloppy programming in general. Yes, usually. Except when the high-memory-footprint algorithm or data structures are vastly more performant than the alternative. But it's mostly true.

We want our processes' memory footprints to be as small as possible in order to fit as many of them as possible into physical RAM. A high-memory-footprint process negatively affects other processes and memory-starves them. Processes COMPETE for RAM.

OSes on the other hand don't compete for RAM. They manage it. They own it. They own all the processes and every last bit of memory on the machine. The OS itself has a memory footprint of its own (the kernel, drivers, processes integral to the system and user experience) and let's be honest, macOS is not the tiniest OS around, but there is no one to memory starve except the OS. The OS doesn't owe anyone anything. Its only responsibility is to provide fast memory to processes (in layman's terms), and how it does that is none of the user's (or processes') business.

OSes use different pagers with different strategies, there's virtual memory, there's memory compression, there are swapfiles, page caches and more. There is literally no "RAM usage" metric anymore that would be comparable between different OSes with different memory management.

macOS will show you some values in Activity Monitor, but those values are to be interpreted by professionals, in the context of macOS, and ideally in the context of "macOS running on a X GB RAM machine".

My MacBook has 16 GB of RAM and its memory usage is currently over 8 gigabytes.
Does it mean that my GF's older 4 GB MacBook would die in the same situation? Not at all, I only have Safari open with three tabs, Sublime Text and Skype, nothing else. The rest is macOS knowing we're on a 16 GB machine used as a software development workhorse and managing the memory accordingly.
Great explanation. Though I am going to hold a grudge that you came a long with an impressively in depth, and clear explanation making my half assed attempt look so bad ?
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Original poster
Oct 24, 2014
10,625
11,296
What's a floppy? I have an Apple II with 48K that loads from tape drive.
 

bsamcash

macrumors 65816
Jul 31, 2008
1,033
2,623
San Jose, CA
The wider issue is that macOS is one big bloat fest. Gone are the days you could run OS X on 4GB with a spinner (Mavericks) and nowadays the last 4GB release was Mojave. The Big in Big Sur means more than just a name.
Simply untrue. Up until earlier this year I would regularly use my 2013 11" MacBook Air with 4GB RAM along side my M1 MacBook Air. I would regularly have two virtual machines open on it running Linux and Windows 10 and never had any memory issues or slow down. I recently got rid of it when I got a dedicated Windows laptop and I regret it because it ran Windows faster in a VM than me 2020 Windows laptop does.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Fawkesguyy

GSWForever8

macrumors 6502a
Apr 10, 2021
530
498
How to debloat Big Sur so it uses less memory? Each OS clean booted and running the same five browser tabs (MR, Reddit, Spotify and two PDFs).

Update: Found a MacOS debloat guide.
https://gist.github.com/pwnsdx/1217727ca57de2dd2a372afdd7a0fc21

Big Sur 11.3.1
View attachment 1770308

Windows 10
View attachment 1770309

Linux
View attachment 1770311
That debloat things looks like just disabling a lot of stuff. I'd rather not do that. Let macOS Big Sur do its thing.
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Original poster
Oct 24, 2014
10,625
11,296
That debloat things looks like just disabling a lot of stuff. I'd rather not do that. Let macOS Big Sur do its thing.

Actually, it makes sense to me since a lot of the items I don't use nor plan to use so no point in them taking up memory.
 
  • Like
Reactions: JMacHack

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Original poster
Oct 24, 2014
10,625
11,296
Speaking of debloating, the first time I was exposed to it blew my mind. I don’t know if win10 can be this debloated, but w7 could go under 500mb http://www.gbgl-hq.com/demoness/Windows_Debloating_Guide.png

Windows 10 can also be debloated with script although I find it quicker to blow away the stock image that comes with the device and do a clean install of Windows 10 which nets a clean boot of about 2GB RAM usage or slightly less. The Windows 10 screenshot in OP is before debloating.

https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
 

Toutou

macrumors 65816
Jan 6, 2015
1,082
1,575
Prague, Czech Republic
I’m just wondering in new M1 whom will the first virtual YellowDog Linux?
Why would we want to do that? It's a long dead distro built for a different architecture.

You can virtualize modern ARM Linux distros just fine (e.g. Parallels will automatically download and set up Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu or Kali for you, and they run like a dream).

Actually I think this thread is all over the place and it's not making a lot of sense as stated from the original post.

This tread started not making sense with the first post. OP is the one all over the place with their opinions and (mis)understanding how things work. (And I mean it, just look at their other posts all over the forum.)
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Original poster
Oct 24, 2014
10,625
11,296
I wasn't talking about gaming. If that's your primary use case, a PC is a far better choice. Unless you need Linux to run other apps, or use it for ideological reasons, gaming on Windows has much less friction.

I used gaming as an example since it's more challenging than apps. If it can run games well then even easier with apps.
 

mi7chy

macrumors G4
Original poster
Oct 24, 2014
10,625
11,296
You can virtualize modern ARM Linux distros just fine (e.g. Parallels will automatically download and set up Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu or Kali for you, and they run like a dream).

VM is third class to bare metal. There are also issues with device passthrough that won't work with some utilities.
 

thedocbwarren

macrumors 6502
Nov 10, 2017
430
378
San Francisco, CA
Why would we want to do that? It's a long dead distro built for a different architecture.

You can virtualize modern ARM Linux distros just fine (e.g. Parallels will automatically download and set up Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu or Kali for you, and they run like a dream).



This tread started not making sense with the first post. OP is the one all over the place with their opinions and (mis)understanding how things work. (And I mean it, just look at their other posts all over the forum.)
"This tread started not making sense with the first post. "

Totally agree!!
 
  • Like
Reactions: LuisN

dogslobber

macrumors 601
Oct 19, 2014
4,670
7,809
Apple Campus, Cupertino CA
Again, all of this is meaningless unless you are talking about a specific performance or usability issue. It is entirely possible that Cocoa and other macOS framework use more memory than whatever UI toolkit uses on Linux. It is also a fact that macOS supports features like purgeable memory which enables applications to use RAM opportunistically, and other systems do not.

If you want to argue that Big Sur uses memory inefficiently, you have to demonstrate that it will suffer from RAM starvation sooner than other systems under same usage conditions. RAM usage statistics alone do not mean anything.

macOS frameworks are terrible memory sucks no matter how you want to characterize it. RAM usage stats mean _a_lot_ for those who can mentally compare a process sizes from running Tiger in 256MB. That's the price of progress: bloat.

So what? Why wouldn't these system services use the RAM if there is plenty available? I don't follow your logic. As to "memory free bugs" — I am running my system for months without restarts. I don't see any evidence for serious memory leaks in the core system.

You mention Window Server... well, Window Server is the process responsible for drawing the application windows and compositing the final result that you see on your screen. Window Server will aggressively pre-render UI elements and cache their contents to enable smooth and efficient desktop compositing. Yes, it can end up using multiple gigabytes of RAM — if that RAM is freely available, and it's a good thing, because it means that the rendering ends up being more efficient. If you actually need that RAM for something more important, Window Server will scale down its usage. This is again the concept of purgeable memory I mentioned earlier, a good chunk of caches allocated by Window Server are purgeable.
The great thing about memory leaks in macOS is that the unused pages get compressed before being flushed to disk by the swapper. It's a win for a leaky OS for sure. But that doesn't hide the fact those issues exist and have existed for several generations since El Capitan.

Tell me this kernel gobbling 5.26GB of real memory is just macOS doing the right thing which is what you're singing here. BTW. purgeable memory is not the savior you think it is. A few MB here and there doesn't help whatsoever as most users know macOS will slow down after a week of use and need a reboot.

Speaking of which. I need to reboot so BRB.
 

robco74

macrumors 6502a
Nov 22, 2020
509
944
I used gaming as an example since it's more challenging than apps. If it can run games well then even easier with apps.
Not necessarily. Gaming boxes rarely require super fast CPUs with lots of cores, or a ton of RAM. They do require a good GPU geared for gaming, but plenty of other apps don't, or would benefit from a workstation card instead. Even certain user categories like creative pros or developers are going to have very different requirements based on their workflow.

But the point stands. If you want a good gaming rig, then the Mac isn't your best option, and that's OK. Perhaps your time would be better spent on Linux gaming forums helping out other users there, rather than coming to a Mac forum to complain about how awful macOS is. Or maybe head over to Asahi Linux and lend them a hand getting Linux up and running on Apple Silicon.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.