SSD hammered by run-away in-built process(es)?

[blufrog]

Hi,

We all know about the issues with mediaanalysisd and photoanalysisd and how they eat memory on a system even when nothing is happening or no photos, etc., are stored on the system.

I was trying to establish the SSD health of the SSD on my iMac 5K (it's 11 years old now!) and first tried a utility on my Mac mini just to see how it worked, and it is showing that the drive has already done 54 TB of read/writes in the 15 or so months I have owned it!!!!

I have next to nothing installed on it because I have been working a completely unrelated job and never got around to installing an external SSD for backup, etc., so never installed anything on the mini until this week.

Most of the stuff I have put on the external disk was copied off other external disks. I haven't suddenly downloaded TBs of data to the mini then copied it over.

Interestingly, the .5 update to Sequoia earlier this month (15.7.5) seems to have reduced the base memory usage after a fresh boot, and has reeled in the memory usage of these processes. Previously, they would run away to using all the memory on the machine, and I would find that it showed 200 or 300 MB of swap being used, too.

SSD health appears to be good (despite it seemingly having written to the entire internal drive over 50 times its capacity!!). It's only a 512 GB internal SSD because I always save and run things from external drives, but this level of apparent usage is outrageous just by an empty OS that isn't doing anything.

Is Apple aware of this absolutely crazy level of disk usage by Sequoia? Has anyone else seen stupidly high reads/writes to the internal SSD on otherwise relatively empty devices? It's not like I'm heavily using the computer up to this point, either. Even when I do use a device, I'm not writing TB of data daily to anything.

What makes this even worse, is the mini has 48 GB of RAM, and so there shouldn't be any reason for it to use the swap file. Right now the system is using 32 GB of ram, with Safari, Music, and Mail open. Music is streaming, and my mail app is using IMAP. I only deal with about 10 e-mails per day.

Shocked is an understatement. I'm pretty miffed, too, as this level of wear, if it continues, will certainly shorten its life.

Up to now, I've mostly used Safari, Mail, and rarely, Music. This is absolutely nuts.

 

[Fishrrman]

"tried a utility on my Mac mini just to see how it worked, and it is showing that the drive has already done 54 TB of read/writes in the 15 or so months I have owned it!"

WHICH app are you talking about here?
(I'd like to check things it with it, myself)

"We all know about the issues with mediaanalysisd and photoanalysisd and how they eat memory on a system"

Have you disabled these processes by using terminal?
(I have)

Do you use time machine?
Have you checked your internal SSD for excessive "snapshots"?
(I've never used tm, I use CarbonCopyCloner instead, no problems with snapshots -- I turned that feature OFF).

 

[th0masp]

Hm, I wasn't aware of any issues regarding media/photoanalysisd. I'm running Tahoe and didn't even know these daemons do exist since they never manage to top the charts, so to speak. Is this a Sequoia-specific issue? Just checked and on this 9 weeks old Mini they both have written around 5.5 MB each and read 70/75 MB, respectively. Seems like small potatoes even when projected far out. 😎

For me on any Mac I've used so far the busy one has always been kernel_task - and that's the only system process that manages to grab my attention, everything else I recognize and am responsible for.

 

[!!!]

I was trying to establish the SSD health of the SSD on my iMac 5K (it's 11 years old now!) and first tried a utility on my Mac mini just to see how it worked, and it is showing that the drive has already done 54 TB of read/writes in the 15 or so months I have owned it!!!!

My M4 Mac mini, just less than a year and a half old has 10 TB written to it, since new. And my 2018 mini (bought in 2019) has 71 TB, so about 11 TB/year; but this isn't accurate as I had an issue with it and got a refurb one, I believe with about 20TB written to it.

So maybe 8 TB/year is my estimate for how much I use, and I consider myself a conscious user of SSD writes, and I try to tune my system to minimize writes. I symlink or point apps with heavy writes/big files to my ext HDD/SSD and I keep an eye on disk writes with my iStat menus item in the menu bar. I also avoid swap as much as possible, for a while I had swap completely disabled on my 2018.

You'll need to establish which programs are writing so much.

 

[BigMcGuire]

Apple Silicon Macs have always been fairly heavy on caching. My 16' MBP 2021 has 143.8TB written from 2022-2026. It gets used every day all day long and it has 64GB of ram.

I use Time Machine and snapshots.

4 days of uptime (disk writes):

54TB in 1 year is a lot.

 

[chown33]

There are similar existing threads, generally in the forum for a particular OS version. Maybe one or more of them has info on how to avoid this, or how significant it is.

Example thread:

mediaanalysisd, photoanalysisd and photolibraryd

Ever since I updated to 14.7.2 these three daemons have been jumping in to run every time I don't actively interact with the computer for some period of time. After lots of googling I still am unsure as to what the blickety these things are doing. As usual, finding any official Apple...

forums.macrumors.com

Search terms: photoanalysisd mediaanalysisd

OS versions where I found search results: Sonoma, Sequoia, Tahoe

 

[blufrog]

@chown33 There is no way to avoid the problem. SIP needs to be disabled as these are in-built processes. They are well-documented, and that isn't even the point of this thread.

@Fishrrman TM was NOT in use prior to now, so it isn't the fact the Mac is creating local snapshots all the time. I didn't have any external drives connected and the system never had anything installed on it precisely because I didn't have it set up.

This Mac shipped with Sequoia, and I have run most versions of it is as updates were released. It's currently on 15.7.5 as I don't know whether I want to run Tahoe yet.

The disk software I was looking at was DriveDx. I did look at SmartMonTools but it was being a PITA to install, and I needed to install Homebrew with all of its problems, so didn't bother with it.

 

[MacCheetah3]

[...] and it is showing that the drive has already done 54 TB of read/writes in the 15 or so months I have owned it!!!!

That does seem high. However, there should still be a good decade left in those NANDs. Plenty of users have shared drive reports with petabytes of writes without signs of failure, plus still good health percentage values.

ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

This is very out of topic (maybe?), but if you need a mac without "internal" screen, the prices are mini:$600, air:$1000 and mbp: $1600. So the screen you won't use will cost $400 or $1000. One more thing: you can upgrade 3rd party ssd, so with apple's price for 256GB upgrade, you get 6 times of...

forums.macrumors.com

Current uptime is ~3.25 days.

What makes this even worse, is the mini has 48 GB of RAM, and so there shouldn't be any reason for it to use the swap file. Right now the system is using 32 GB of ram, with Safari, Music, and Mail open. Music is streaming, and my mail app is using IMAP. I only deal with about 10 e-mails per day.

That’s fine. Mac OS/macOS will use as much RAM as feasibly/sensibly possible, including lots of caching if it can.

View memory usage in Activity Monitor on Mac

In Activity Monitor, view the amount of system memory being used on your Mac, including physical, compressed, wired, and app memory.

support.apple.com

Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor

Use Activity Monitor on your Mac to see if memory is being used efficiently and if you need more memory (RAM).

support.apple.com

We all know about the issues with mediaanalysisd and photoanalysisd and how they eat memory on a system even when nothing is happening or no photos, etc., are stored on the system.

I am aware of some complaints. Although I haven’t seen any consistency, including it being widespread. In my own little corner, I haven’t witnessed any problems except some syncing delays at times, though I don’t keep a ton of photos, a few hundred thus far in the Photos app. iCloud Photo sync is enabled on some devices, put simply, because I’ve become tired of trying to remember to check and possibly disable it after (some) updates (re-)enable it.

Anyway...

I cannot think of a simple way to narrow down the culprit for you.

 

[blufrog]

@MacCheetah3 Thanks for the info!

Since the 15.7.5 update, these processes settled down dramatically, and the memory use of the OS overall after boot is slightly lower (6-8 GB). I don't have AI enabled.

If you search for the daemons mediaanalysisd, photoanalysisd, you will find a lot of discussions around the internet about these processes running away, eating all the system memory, and even hanging the machine on occasion (I never experienced that).

Good to know the internal SSDs can take a lot write-cycles and be OK. I hadn't read anywhere of people complaining about the writes to the SSD, so either they didn't have a problem, or didn't know, hence why I started this thread. Most people are going to be using their machines from day 1, so probably wouldn't even notice.