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ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

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The first post of this thread is a WikiPost and can be edited by anyone with the appropiate permissions. Your edits will be public.
childoftheko4n said:
mind sharing a report of your TBW? Just curious how it compares. I have yet to experience or see anything even remotely close to the swap usage on the M1.
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I have totally miss his post, it's on previous page (6). What makes me curious is the way he is using the computer.

A lot of video editing from what I see (tools list). Saving, cache etc. can eat the SSD terabytes writtes very quickly.
hmmm Not sure what to think about that.
 
man, really wish we would get some word out of Apple inregards to this >.< getting antsy wanting a new Mac for lightroom/photoshop. Using them on windows just feels...not good for some reason.
 
I don't think anything much is going to be forthcoming from Apple. The 8G and 16G M1 models perform extremely well. Their architecture and the speed of the internal SSDs make it possible, even with fairly heavy swap. That said, there is no free lunch. I am not running about with my hair on fire about the TBW issue. I think the Apple SSDs can handle it, certainly for several years under normal or even semi-high usage. Most of us are very likely to want to trade up to the newer M technologies before our M1s become paperweights due to exorbitant TBWs.
 
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the problem possibly arises when heavy users (...) potentially trash their drives in 16 months or so
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It should be clear by now that heavy usage is not the cause of this issue. There are people who use their M1 Mac just for light tasks like office and surfing the web, yet they face insane TBW stats.
On the other hand, there are heavy users who don't face this issue at all - like me. I already posted my stats last week. Now, a few days later, not much has changed. Did some heavy 8k editing in Final Cut today and the machine was swapping a lot. SMART stats keep looking fine.

Bildschirmfoto 2021-02-22 um 19.07.12.png
 
CMMChris said:
It should be clear by now that heavy usage is not the cause of this issue. There are people who use their M1 Mac just for light tasks like office and surfing the web, yet they face insane TBW stats.
On the other hand, there are heavy users who don't face this issue at all - like me. I already posted my stats last week. Now, a few days later, not much has changed. Did some heavy 8k editing in Final Cut today and the machine was swapping a lot. SMART stats keep looking fine.

View attachment 1733628
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It might be good to have people that are experiencing this issue to work together. Produce a list of all software and compare it with others. It might be one or a handful of programs that are causing the issue. I think someone reported an app was logging to documents folders and iCloud Drive was constantly running which was causing their issue.
 
xWhiplash said:
It might be good to have people that are experiencing this issue to work together. Produce a list of all software and compare it with others. It might be one or a handful of programs that are causing the issue. I think someone reported an app was logging to documents folders and iCloud Drive was constantly running which was causing their issue.
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Yes, that was me. Now several days later bytes written is at least 10-fold lower than what I saw previously in a single day. Cloudd and kernel_task have been overtaken in the Activity Monitor disk writes ranking by backupd. All three are below 25GB after several days of uptime.

I am now very confident that the cause of my unusually high TBW on my M1 mini (16GB/1TB) was TG Pro logging temperature every second to a file stored in iCloud. Interestingly, on my M1 MBA (8GB/512GB) TBW is much lower and that machine has never had TG Pro set to log temperatures to disk.

Of course, I don't deny that others may have an entirely different experience with swap as the main culprit. All I can say, is it would be worth looking at any apps you have that constantly write a log to disk. In my case the log file itself was small (100s of KB), but it caused cloudd to write hundreds of GBs per day.
 
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antipodean said:
Yes, that was me. Now several days later bytes written is at least 10-fold lower than what I saw previously in a single day. Cloudd and kernel_task have been overtaken in the Activity Monitor disk writes ranking by backupd. All three are below 25GB after several days of uptime.

I am now very confident that the cause of my unusually high TBW on my M1 mini (16GB/1TB) was TG Pro logging temperature every second to a file stored in iCloud. Interestingly, on my M1 MBA (8GB/512GB) TBW is much lower and that machine has never had TG Pro set to log temperatures to disk.

Of course, I don't deny that others may have an entirely different experience with swap as the main culprit. All I can say, is it would be worth looking at any apps you have that constantly write a log to disk. In my case the log file itself was small (100s of KB), but it caused cloudd to write hundreds of GBs per day.
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You may very well be right about this. I was running iStatistica Pro and decided to shut it down because of its constant logging. Ever since, I have seen my swap activity and TBW decrease significantly.
 
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CMMChris said:
It should be clear by now that heavy usage is not the cause of this issue. There are people who use their M1 Mac just for light tasks like office and surfing the web, yet they face insane TBW stats.
On the other hand, there are heavy users who don't face this issue at all - like me. I already posted my stats last week. Now, a few days later, not much has changed. Did some heavy 8k editing in Final Cut today and the machine was swapping a lot. SMART stats keep looking fine.

View attachment 1733628
Click to expand...
sorry i didnt mean for it to sound like just heavy use is causing it, its clearly not. I see the issue across all sorts of use and its unacceptable. These M1 macs would be a homerun if this got sorted out imo.
 
I can't see anything other than google chrome helper writing a significant amount in activity monitor which has 30GB written.
 
dave_kor said:
It does.You need to look at numbers after a week of use with Big Sur, not total life of the machine.
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Just to add a data point, my Intel MBP has much lower TBW than my M1 mini (3.7 TB vs 24.8TB). This despite the Intel MBP being much older (June 2020 vs. Nov 2020). The Intel MBP has had Big Sur since its pubic release. Both machines have 1TB SSDs.

One obvious difference is that the MBP has 32GB (vs. 16GB in the M1 mini). I have used the MBP as a primary machine with VMs, Bootcamp, FCP (albeit external TB3 SSD for video editing).

A quick back of envelope calculation indicates that neither machine is likely to reach its SSD write limits within the 3-year life time I plan to keep them. All the more so now that I have stopped the log file problem that was causing excessive writes on the mini.

Edit: "swap used" on the MBP right now in Activity Monitor: 0 bytes!
 
Finally got smartmontools working and it’s showing 22.7 TBW since I got my M1 MBP 16GB/2TB back in mid-November. Also shows 25 unsafe shutdowns! That’s probably the kernel panics I’m getting that a lot of people have reported when rebooting the M1 MBA or MBP in clamshell mode.

7F59CA5F-DD97-466A-9D79-0FD8E2B8DEB7.jpeg
 
Im not installing any brew things. The benchmarks and apps show no degrading performance and the 13” is for basic use. I want the 16” Pro then I’m going to push that baby.
 
M1 MBP 512GB 8GB since late November.

No Adobe apps. Moderate sized photo library, moderate Music library, only really do web, office, email and gaming (Civ6 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider). Steam apps held on an external SSD.

SSD Life.png
 
Just info share.

MacPro 7,1 with more RAM than I normally need. Light usage I would say.

Bought it from Dec 2019.

Screenshot 2021-02-24 at 2.30.11 AM.png
 
Well, nothing special. I just hit the power button (which log out the user in big sur) and that's how I go sleep. Should I always click on "turn off"? I somewhere read that it's okay to let mac just "be".
 
Marrek said:
Well, nothing special. I just hit the power button (which log out the user in big sur) and that's how I go sleep. Should I always click on "turn off"? I somewhere read that it's okay to let mac just "be".
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I don't know, but I suspect the previous poster means something like "how did you achieve 224 TBW in 612 hours of power on time?".
 
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