32GB Memory and Swap Used

[corneliu]

I have a mac side by side with an Ubuntu and the memory management on the mac simply sucks. As soon as you go through a number of files that sum up bigger then your RAM it starts caching files and using the swap until it is sooo sloooow that you think it froze.
you can buy “69” GB RAM and it will simply do the same. The same with the number of files. I encode HLS ts files. Try connecting a 8TB disk filled with a few million files and Mac OS will launch a big bunch of Postgres (which is just a slow database) processes and simply say it is
indexing until you see fireworks outside and you notice that the year changed...
So the holy grail Mac simply sucks for many years and if you put it side by side with an Ubuntu on an older configuration the tasks on the Mac look truly ridiculous. So if any one never had these problems ... I bet they never used too many files

Edit (hoping that someone that matters and cares reads this):
My 2 cent regarding the memory problem is making a difference between important files (like OS files and apps) and any others. If your safari lands in the swap it looks like it never gets out of there again.

The difference between the SSD and the good old HDD is just the bad driver.
when indexing starts and it hacks like crazy on an external HDD it feels like in the old days when you had a scratched CD and the IDE controller hijacked the whole system.
This does not happen on Linux and I bet they solved the USB 3 controller problems in the new intels many years ago.
I bought 5 8TB LaCie HDD... 2 of them ended up formatting wrong and after a few retries ended up completely dead. No system can see them even with fdisk.
The solution was to use the somewhere hidden AFS ... but nowhere it says that don’t do this on SSD because it will destroy them while using them after formatting and you loos all your data...

I have my mails for over 15 years now... it says there are over 180 000. The Mail App does not even show the content of one Mail after hours and this after a fresh system install. I keep all my work on external SSD but the user is not allowed to be installed there... on Linux it makes no difference.

... and this weird thing having my iCloud user in the system settings ... so every time I need to make changes I have to wait minutes before it talks to the Apple HQ and says: yes ... you are who you said many many times you are ... bad ... plain bad.

Dear Apple making great hardware with a bad OS is sad and for us simple folks just more sad after you know that everything was working fine some years ago...

 

[TexAgDino]

I have a mac side by side with an Ubuntu and the memory management on the mac simply sucks. As soon as you go through a number of files that sum up bigger then your RAM it starts caching files and using the swap until it is sooo sloooow that you think it froze.
you can buy “69” GB RAM and it will simply do the same. The same with the number of files. I encode HLS ts files. Try connecting a 8TB disk filled with a few million files and Mac OS will launch a big bunch of Postgres (which is just a slow database) processes and simply say it is
indexing until you see fireworks outside and you notice that the year changed...
So the holy grail Mac simply sucks for many years and if you put it side by side with an Ubuntu on an older configuration the tasks on the Mac look truly ridiculous. So if any one never had these problems ... I bet they never used too many files

Edit (hoping that someone that matters and cares reads this):
My 2 cent regarding the memory problem is making a difference between important files (like OS files and apps) and any others. If your safari lands in the swap it looks like it never gets out of there again.

The difference between the SSD and the good old HDD is just the bad driver.
when indexing starts and it hacks like crazy on an external HDD it feels like in the old days when you had a scratched CD and the IDE controller hijacked the whole system.
This does not happen on Linux and I bet they solved the USB 3 controller problems in the new intels many years ago.
I bought 5 8TB LaCie HDD... 2 of them ended up formatting wrong and after a few retries ended up completely dead. No system can see them even with fdisk.
The solution was to use the somewhere hidden AFS ... but nowhere it says that don’t do this on SSD because it will destroy them while using them after formatting and you loos all your data...

I have my mails for over 15 years now... it says there are over 180 000. The Mail App does not even show the content of one Mail after hours and this after a fresh system install. I keep all my work on external SSD but the user is not allowed to be installed there... on Linux it makes no difference.

... and this weird thing having my iCloud user in the system settings ... so every time I need to make changes I have to wait minutes before it talks to the Apple HQ and says: yes ... you are who you said many many times you are ... bad ... plain bad.

Dear Apple making great hardware with a bad OS is sad and for us simple folks just more sad after you know that everything was working fine some years ago...

I luckily haven't had issues with mac mail yet. Like you I have messages for the past decade plus. As for external drives, on a T2 mac (on Mac OS Catalina) you maybe need to enable booting from external drives before it allows you to work directly from your external ssd. Although, Im far from the expert on this and hopefully someone else can chime in that knows much more than I. I just know I had to enable boot from external because I use carbon copy cloner to do backups and the program instructed me to do this before the initial sync.
Mac OS Catalina is bitter sweet update for me. I like the sidecar functionality built in, and a few other things, but I am having some issues with bluetooth keyboards (apple magic keyboard) not being recognized sometimes. I did have a lot of wake from sleep issues with my last mac on Mojave that seems better but still not great when Im at work with dual external monitors. Hopefully the next os finds a happy mix of stability and new features. Same goes for ios.

 

[corneliu]

I luckily haven't had issues with mac mail yet. Like you I have messages for the past decade plus. As for external drives, on a T2 mac (on Mac OS Catalina) you maybe need to enable booting from external drives before it allows you to work directly from your external ssd. Although, Im far from the expert on this and hopefully someone else can chime in that knows much more than I. I just know I had to enable boot from external because I use carbon copy cloner to do backups and the program instructed me to do this before the initial sync.
Mac OS Catalina is bitter sweet update for me. I like the sidecar functionality built in, and a few other things, but I am having some issues with bluetooth keyboards (apple magic keyboard) not being recognized sometimes. I did have a lot of wake from sleep issues with my last mac on Mojave that seems better but still not great when Im at work with dual external monitors. Hopefully the next os finds a happy mix of stability and new features. Same goes for ios.

Thank you for your advice. I tried a long time ago to install the Mac OS on an external SSD but when I erased it there was no Manage Settings button and I thought it was not possible to have a GUID partition on an external SSD. I thought it was something connected to the APFS problem with SSDs.
After I read your post I googled this issue and found the simple solution to goto
View->Show all disks (in Disk Utility)
and after this I could select the disk itself and could manage settings and select GUID.

after installing Mac OS Catalina on a external SSD everything runs very smooth.
Even the Mail is working almost instantly.

so what can I say? Thank you, you really made more then my day ... and they should prohibit Macs with the OS on a HDD 😋

 

[TexAgDino]

Thank you for your advice. I tried a long time ago to install the Mac OS on an external SSD but when I erased it there was no Manage Settings button and I thought it was not possible to have a GUID partition on an external SSD. I thought it was something connected to the APFS problem with SSDs.
After I read your post I googled this issue and found the simple solution to goto
View->Show all disks (in Disk Utility)
and after this I could select the disk itself and could manage settings and select GUID.

after installing Mac OS Catalina on a external SSD everything runs very smooth.
Even the Mail is working almost instantly.

so what can I say? Thank you, you really made more then my day ... and they should prohibit Macs with the OS on a HDD 😋

Im glad I was able to help! I reformatted a hard drive last year and this was before I knew about the show all disks was needed to properly reformat without messing up the os reinstall. It was a pain but luckily I found my school's IT department had a usb copy of the new os and was able to get me going again. I don't know why they felt they needed to add this step.
Yes, this day and age spinning hard drives is a travesty since even the slow ssd's will offer much improvement I think over hdd. Hopefully they will finally move all the imacs over to ssd's. Many consumers who buy the 21 inch will not know to pay the hefty premium for this option and just go for the cheapest base spec and it will unfortunately impact the longevity of their computer.

 

[corneliu]

Im glad I was able to help! I reformatted a hard drive last year and this was before I knew about the show all disks was needed to properly reformat without messing up the os reinstall. It was a pain but luckily I found my school's IT department had a usb copy of the new os and was able to get me going again. I don't know why they felt they needed to add this step.
Yes, this day and age spinning hard drives is a travesty since even the slow ssd's will offer much improvement I think over hdd. Hopefully they will finally move all the imacs over to ssd's. Many consumers who buy the 21 inch will not know to pay the hefty premium for this option and just go for the cheapest base spec and it will unfortunately impact the longevity of their computer.

the problem down here @the end of Europe, they don’t sell configurations with SSD and if you go to an Apple authorized service you pay for an 8GB and a SSD another half the price of the iMac. It’s not so much about the money and it’s more the feeling that you are taken for stupid when you look at the regular market prices. So I just got an 1 TB Samsung 1.8”external SSD that has R/W at over 500 Mb/s and is very small and light.
It comes with an USB-C connector and is like made for the Mac and it just runs great 😊

 

[TexAgDino]

the problem down here @the end of Europe, they don’t sell configurations with SSD and if you go to an Apple authorized service you pay for an 8GB and a SSD another half the price of the iMac. It’s not so much about the money and it’s more the feeling that you are taken for stupid when you look at the regular market prices. So I just got an 1 TB Samsung 1.8”external SSD that has R/W at over 500 Mb/s and is very small and light.
It comes with an USB-C connector and is like made for the Mac and it just runs great 😊

That Apple tax is especially harsh for y'all. Im glad that with the 16in that at least they increased the performance significantly for the same price point (doubled ssd storage for same price, and the graphics cards perform better than the highest end Vega BTO of last generation while "only" being a small upgrade price ($100?). That being said, the base prices is too high still compared to many comparable PC's. If I had went imac then a super fast external like your doing makes sense rather than pay several hundred dollars more for a built in ssd.