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macOS Tahoe + WindowServer / memory pressure over long uptimes — anyone else seeing this?

boppin said:
Back to the original topic. I checked last time and the process called "WindowServer" was using about 1.2 GB of RAM, but I didn't notice any slowdown.
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It's tied to many other resources, you can't just look at how much RAM it uses.
 
SDAVE said:
I think a lot of Apple apologists are doing the same thing they have done for decades.

Tahoe just overwhelms the system for no apparent reason whatsoever. Liquid Glass/translucency or whatever effect they use should NOT impede performance. It is even taking away precious GPU/CPU cycles from M series chips, which would rather go to more important things like apps that are running in the foreground.

I also do significant work in Google Chrome (Google Suite and Web App based workflows), while folks may say Chrome is a GPU/CPU/Memory hog, I disagree, because my same workflow is perfectly fine on the same machine(s) in Sequoia. Even if you quit Chrome and only run pro software like Creative Cloud (Photoshop, After Effects, etc) there is a significant performance drop. My timeline playheads just jump around erratically and tasks like previews in AE are just slow which breaks my concentration/workflow and makes me really angry.

This is simple A/B testing. Are we saying that later versions of Tahoe won't make performance better? No, what we're saying is no amount of Liquid Crass is worth the extra horsepower that's being eaten away here.

I remember when Leopard came out I had a higher end G5, and even by .3 it didn't run this bad or slow down my workflow. I use my Macs professionally for a living and they need to do certain things with my workflow.

I'm so glad I went back to Sequoia. I wish I had a backup of it so I didn't just waste 2 days restoring it manually. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise though, I made a fresh install and move stuff over manually and I hadn't done a fresh install of macOS in years.
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Tahoe is likely not the cause no matter how much you attempt to claim otherwise. I can run Chrome and Adobe apps while also running VSCode, Antigravity and LM Studio and I don't see any slowdowns under Tahoe. I have a feeling that something other than the OS/UI is running under the hood of your machine that is causing the slowdowns you are experiencing.
 
Without using swap at all macOS, Linux and other operating systems will crash.

Yet another thing:

To put it another way: Operating systems like macOS are intentionally not optimized to avoid using swap space and to postpone its use for as long as possible.

They are optimized to make swapping and retrieval as efficient as possible when swap space is needed (which is considered the norm). Inactive memory plays a crucial role in this, acting as a kind of probability-optimized cache. This allows a swapped-out page that is being accessed to be reactivated without swapping it back in, i.e., without any time loss. Therefore, it's an intermediate state between free and used. It contains memory pages that are likely to be released and reused with a certain probability without any time loss.

Anyone observing a macOS system with normal memory usage over extended periods will notice that inactive and free memory are consistently kept at about one-third of the available RAM.
 
The German Mac website MTN reported that the WindowServer Bus process consumed up to 5 GB of RAM under the Ventura operating system or earlier. As far as I understand, this was a bug at the time, possibly a specific one.
 
I've rediscovered two old screenshots of mine. They also show a "high" swap usage, but this all happened on an old white MacBook from 2010 running OSX 10.11.

The red memory pressure came from quitting all of running apps. That was truly inedible. I've never experienced anything like it before or since. Even on my old, now-retired MacBook Pro from early 2012 with an SSD, I never experienced such a performance drop. I don't know how much swap space was ever used there, because I never saw it and consequently never checked the Activity Monitor.
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boppin said:
Without using swap at all macOS, Linux and other operating systems will crash.

Yet another thing:

To put it another way: Operating systems like macOS are intentionally not optimized to avoid using swap space and to postpone its use for as long as possible.

They are optimized to make swapping and retrieval as efficient as possible when swap space is needed (which is considered the norm). Inactive memory plays a crucial role in this, acting as a kind of probability-optimized cache. This allows a swapped-out page that is being accessed to be reactivated without swapping it back in, i.e., without any time loss. Therefore, it's an intermediate state between free and used. It contains memory pages that are likely to be released and reused with a certain probability without any time loss.

Anyone observing a macOS system with normal memory usage over extended periods will notice that inactive and free memory are consistently kept at about one-third of the available RAM.
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They won’t crash, infact lot of folks here disabled swap when there was paranoid about writing to ssd will impact the life of Mac. Many flavors of Linux on the other hand hand lets you control swappiness with a setting of 0-100. A DB server, an App server or file server have very different usage pattern. I run a Linux workstation but default works great for me.
When it comes to RAM you have enough or don’t, swap or pack of swap isn’t gonna change for that level of usage or usage pattern.
 
dmccloud said:
Tahoe is likely not the cause no matter how much you attempt to claim otherwise. I can run Chrome and Adobe apps while also running VSCode, Antigravity and LM Studio and I don't see any slowdowns under Tahoe. I have a feeling that something other than the OS/UI is running under the hood of your machine that is causing the slowdowns you are experiencing.
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lol ok bud, love how you're gonna tell someone who's been using computers for 30 years that I'm the problem not Apple.
 
Yes, of course. There are also people who install various "tools" to speed up the system and then wonder why the system becomes incredibly sluggish.
 
SDAVE said:
lol ok bud, love how you're gonna tell someone who's been using computers for 30 years that I'm the problem not Apple.
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We don't know at all your setup. No screenshots from activity monitor or an EtreCheck. So completely useless your answer, I think.
 
boppin said:
We don't know at all your setup. No screenshots from activity monitor or an EtreCheck. So completely useless your answer, I think.
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I don't have to show you anything. I know what I'm doing.

There's literally hundreds of posts of negative feedback on Tahoe.

Stop making excuses for Apple.

Just because the lot of you do basic tasks on your computers doesn't mean others who are professionals like me aren't having problems.

I'm back on Sequoia and it works perfectly.
 
SDAVE said:
ok broski lol
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Sorry Bro. No one can help you with your issues you described without any useful information. And I don't think that you want any help at all so you might be trying to look for it somehow.

Last word to this senseless thread:
I remember that some previous versions of OSX / macOS before, some people found out that outdated kernel extensions and browser plugins like Silverlight or whatever they are named caused some instability. And I am not defending Apple, Inc. at all. Why should I do that? Ether all of your systems may be damaged somehow, a serious bug causing this or as said before some kind of incompatible kernel extension or whatever is causing this problem / issue. But if you don't want to research it ...
 
boppin said:
Sorry Bro. No one can help you with your issues you described without any useful information. And I don't think that you want any help at all so you might be trying to look for it somehow.

Last word to this senseless thread:
I remember that some previous versions of OSX / macOS before, some people found out that outdated kernel extensions and browser plugins like Silverlight or whatever they are named caused some instability. And I am not defending Apple, Inc. at all. Why should I do that? Ether all of your systems may be damaged somehow, a serious bug causing this or as said before some kind of incompatible kernel extension or whatever is causing this problem / issue. But if you don't want to research it ...
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No one asked for any help, especially from you lol

You're a light user its fine and you don't have much experience in these things. Carry on bud.
 
SDAVE said:
No one asked for any help, especially from you lol

You're a light user its fine and you don't have much experience in these things. Carry on bud.
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OK back to the conversation at hand which I think you understand. I think for now we'll see what 26.3 does (probably nothing) and I am weighing a downgrade. It's a pain. And I might just do it.
 
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RumorConsumer said:
OK back to the conversation at hand which I think you understand. I think for now we'll see what 26.3 does (probably nothing) and I am weighing a downgrade. It's a pain. And I might just do it.
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I suggest this for you:

Make a new Volume for Sequoia under the main SSDs Container and install Sequoia on it and start working there. And at the same time keep the Tahoe volume as well and use them side by side as they keep updating the OS, who knows it might get to a point for you that makes you happy. You can always delete the Tahoe volume once all your files are moved over (manually) (you will have access to both volumes in Sequoia) and then when Tahoe gets to a good place, just do a straight upgrade to Tahoe and all your files will come along with it.

For me on my Mac Pro its a bit different because I truly don't believe Apple can get the Intel performance to Sequoia levels. There is just no point for me to upgrade to Tahoe on the MP, it's the last version of the OS supported anyway. I am very happy with Sequoia. Since it is a professional machine I do work on, I don't really care about Liquid Glass and other stuff that are useless to me. I sit on my desktop, do my work and get up. I can continue anything personal on my personal/wrk MacBook Pros (which have Tahoe on it).

On my M series laptops, I am already on Tahoe, so looking forward to performance improvements there, especially that there are rumors that macOS 27 is supposed to be focused on performance improvements a la Snow Leopard, that, I am definitely happy about. They also got rid of Alan Dye so we actually may see this come true.

I am going to retire this Mac Pro and get a Mac Studio M5 Ultra (or an M3 Ultra if they are on a deep discount once the M5s are out), I am trying to squeeze out another 12 months out of it. It's getting long in the tooth anyway especially for single core performance. I need more than 128GB of RAM on my desktop and the higher end CPU (GPU doesnt matter too much to me, but having more cores is welcome). I am mainly working in the Adobe Suite day to and Figma/Chrome web based apps, and who knows, Adobe might drop support for Sequoia by next year since they are forced to work on Tahoe.
 
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Seriously, guys. I really don't know what all the fuss is about. I only have 16 GB of RAM here, and everything runs very smoothly. Even with the "Reduce performance" option enabled. You'd either have to list your workflow or the programs you're using so I can reproduce the issue here. For the techies out there: memory usage is fine, and the compressed memory is currently only 3.03 GB. Swap is at 0 bytes.
 
boppin said:
Seriously, guys. I really don't know what all the fuss is about. I only have 16 GB of RAM here, and everything runs very smoothly. Even with the "Reduce performance" option enabled. You'd either have to list your workflow or the programs you're using so I can reproduce the issue here. For the techies out there: memory usage is fine, and the compressed memory is currently only 3.03 GB. Swap is at 0 bytes.
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No way you are running 3GB only in use. Are you actually doing anything on your computer? Few Safari or Chrome tabs watch that fill up. Leave the browsers running and run other apps like Adobe.
 
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