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jake_the_tester

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 18, 2021
20
29
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For anyone who wanna do developping or designing on M1 Mac, don't buy the 8G version.
I got 2T+ writes in 1 day. Even if you wanna so some light coding, M1 is not for you. When the system is caching using SSD, you will have so much lagging.
 
You need to expand your comments with greater detail.

From your screenshots, it appears you are running a web server which is running WordPress and mySQL, but I could be wrong. You have Chrome open, which appears to have a lot of tabs open, hence the amount of memory it's using.

What development tools are you using, as I can't see any in the screen shots?
 
Which M1 Mac is this from?
Usually when kernel_task is writing a lot to disk, your CPU is getting close to being overheated. What does the CPU usage of kernel_task, on the CPU tab of Activity Monitor, look like, while using your M1 Mac?
If kernel_task is using a large percentage of your Mac CPU

Also, I see 3 users logged in. Why is that?
And two of your load averages almost peaking : 3.67 3.59. Memory pressure at 33% and in the green looks okay to me.
 
So glad all development is alike and there is absolutely no difference between developing web applications, mainframe background data analysis algorithms, Java applications, smartphone applications, etc. :rolleyes:

I have an Air M1 with 8GB and develop software all the time. I used to do the same on a 12" MacBook with 8GB and had no issues either. Your comment is completely worthless without context and specific use case.
 
Just so you know if you're running any kind of current macOS Big Sur needs more than eight gigs of RAM to function properly. If you want to do any kind of meaningful work you need to have at least 32 gigs of RAM on a mackintosh with it is a huge OS and has huge overhead .
 
Just so you know if you're running any kind of current macOS Big Sur needs more than eight gigs of RAM to function properly. If you want to do any kind of meaningful work you need to have at least 32 gigs of RAM on a mackintosh with it is a huge OS and has huge overhead .
Is this a parody? Because unless it is, please stop posting this nonsense. I have a machine in the next room running Big Sur on 4 GB RAM.
 
Hey, man your absolutely right. For both development and video editing, the M1 machine writes terabytes and terabytes of data per day and it gets very laggy when coding. I understand the need to use a lot of chrome tabs because while developing I too use chrome even though I prefer safari. Both will be laggy no matter what. VSCode is almost always laggy. Funnily enough, the thing that isn't laggy is actually running the programs usually(for me that is). Web development is kind of painful cause it is really laggy and it's better even with like 8-year-old CPUs( I should know, I used one for years). Also if you do a smartctl -o /disk0 can you verify that this is close to normal as a developer. This is about 7 months old. Also, I regularly use close to 11 gigs of ram with just light development.
 

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Also another thing i notice a lot is the comptuer is slow to startup and turn off with many thigns running
 
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OP wrote:
"don't buy the 8G version.
I got 2T+ writes in 1 day. Even if you wanna so some light coding, M1 is not for you. When the system is caching using SSD, you will have so much lagging."


Just a day or two previously, I made a comment about the excessive VM swapping and disk writes on the m1 series Macs, and someone replied that such problems were limited to a very few users.

Your post seems to refute such arguments.

I'm thinking the "disk swapping/excessive writing" issue is something that is actually "built into" the "unified memory" design of the m-series CPU, and that Apple doesn't want to discuss it. Hence, they've remained dead silent about it in the face of a long-running thread about it here at macrumors...
 
Thats interesting. Personally I haven't recommended anyone go for sub-16GB on Mac in at least a few years. As good as the M1 chip is, I'm not sure how you can get around needing more RAM. Swap has always and will always be slower by design.
 
So glad all development is alike and there is absolutely no difference between developing web applications, mainframe background data analysis algorithms, Java applications, smartphone applications, etc. :rolleyes:

I have an Air M1 with 8GB and develop software all the time. I used to do the same on a 12" MacBook with 8GB and had no issues either. Your comment is completely worthless without context and specific use case.
I used to even make games on Unity on 2010 MacBook Pro.
Now I use MacBook Air M1 8GB for Xcode. It works fine. I even have 8GB MSI and I use Visual Studio and do WPF apps and it's fine.
 
By the way, this user uses iStats? I used iStat on my brand new MacBook Air. It showed that my battery life is 0%.
It's 100% according to Apple (System preferences).
I deleted it and asked for a refund. I wouldn't trust it.
 
heck, what are Russianz using for infiltration of foreign fuel systems?
we should these laptops-computers!
and if they use surface pros to hack apple M1s, what a Microsoft commercial that will be!
 
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Are you certain your problems are caused by lacking memory?

8gb wouldn’t be enough, regardless if you were on M1 or Intel.

This is exactly why the perception of Apple Silicon RAM somehow defying physics needs to end.
But 8GB on M1 is equivalent to 16GB on other architectures.

/s
Apple Silicon Macs have been demonstrated to have exceptional multitasking performance even in access to little memory.


That is what is meant by the phrase.
 
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You can do coding with a simple text editor, such as Sublime, hell, even vim or nano can be used for this, in essence, coding per se is the most lightweight task you can perform on a computer.

If your dev environment is virtualized, you could be pushing commits to a remote and 2GB would be plenty.

For local VM's, emulators, dozens of tabs on multiple browsers, heavy IDE's, the sky is the limit, regardless of underlying architecture.
 
Is this a parody? Because unless it is, please stop posting this nonsense. I have a machine in the next room running Big Sur on 4 GB RAM.
4gb?! What machine is it? Does it have an empty slot? I don’t remember the last time I saw 4gb as an option!
 
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