TheSynchronizer thanks for the reply. I am getting low TBW when using my macbook for browsing, watching Netflix, listening to Music.. but my headache is with Adobe suite.. Lightroom CC and Photoshop, I know I will not use them too much on MB, as I have nice PC with big monitor, but anyways I would like to reduce excessive writes with those apps. Affinity photo is using much less swap, some other RAW developers as well, but Adobe.. like crazy. If anyone knows some tricks for LR and PS, please share them with me.
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ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written
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stigman
macrumors regular
Safari causes massive swap? what about this?
If so, there won't be an issue for me using other browser than Safari and I'd be totally fine switching to Edge as it works well with Chrome extensions? Though I have to say, I'm 'tab abuser' I usually have opened like 20 tabs in general (mostly articles, dictionaries, no vids) + spotify + word/excel. That's basically what I do on daily basis.
Safa
Your current daily swap is what I'm hoping to achieve as it seems very reasonable amount of swap per mouth. What are exactly the tweaks you've applied beside extensions in browsers?
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TheSynchronizer
macrumors 6502
Ah yes, and so i’ve heard time and time again about Adobe giving a lot of m1 users a hard time. It’s unfortunate how long it’s taking Adobe to update their apps to be M1 native as they seem to be going crazy under rosetta 2.
Anyway, the goal is to give these culprits as much RAM as possible. So in your place I would definitely use a browser such as Brave with Auto Tab Discarder set to have a very limited amount of non discarded tabs open at once. For example right now I have 3 active tabs, and 73 discarded tabs, and Brave’s memory usage never exceeds 1.7GB on my system, usually hovering around 1.3GB. This generally works great at all times.
Then whenever you open one of these adobe apps, maybe just be conscious of how many other apps you have running, as they will be swapped out to the SSD when the adobe app starts demanding ram.
It could also be worth trying excluding your whole system drive in time machine settings until you’re actually making a backup - as TM might be repeatedly making TM snapshots with temporary adobe cache which could be a part of the writes. It might also be worth trying excluding folders and categories you never need to search in Spotlight - for example the System folder. This is because spotlight indexing might be repeatedly rewriting its index with adobe caches which again might be a part in the writes.
And when eventually Adobe decides to update their apps, hopefully the crazy swaps will be fixed by default. But until then...
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TheSynchronizer
macrumors 6502
I'm currently using Brave to type this, with 76 tabs open (I do software development and so I constantly have countless tabs open for research). Activity monitor is showing around 1.5GB used by Brave in total as of writing this. Brave is a Chromium browser just like Edge and so the same sort of logic applies, though from my experience this browser is the lightest on memory from the browsers I've tested, and I also very much enjoy it's built in privacy and ad blocking features.
Anyway, the most important extension to get is a tab discarding extension - the one I use and recommend is Auto Tab Discard. Tab discarding is automatic, seamless, and you barely notice it as pages load back very fast given you have a decent connection. You can open even a million tabs if you want and your memory usage will stay consistently low. Wherever you scroll to on a page is remembered so when you switch back to a discarded tab you don't really notice that it was ever released from memory. And lastly any pages that need to stay open i.e. they're receiving text input or playing media, they do not get discarded.
Another extension to get if you're not using Brave or another browser with built in ad/tracking blocking is uBlock - also reduces memory consumption of websites.
There are 2 main problems with safari as of today. Firstly, it is very excessive on caching. When you close a tab, instead of releasing the memory of those tabs it puts most of it into 'Safari Cached Web Content' - then as you proceed to open new tabs, very often your memory usage temporarily spikes as new tabs take up memory, and the cached content is also in memory - this often causes excessive, unnecessary swapping.
Secondly Safari has a very limited extension store - the only tab discarding extension I can find for Safari doesn't seem to function properly.
I've done various other tweaks to the system to get my writes to a minimum - but as I see it now I believe simply changing browsers as such is enough to fix the writes. If you happen to still want to reduce them further I'd be happy to detail them from my past posts in this thread - they include changing pmset settings in terminal, reducing spotlight indexing, and preventing Time Machine snapshots until you actually make a backup.
Is that 1.5 GB for the browser only? Or is that including the Rendering Engines/Helper processes for the GPU, etc? If so, that's impressive. I'm not one to abuse tabs, so I'll never reach that amount.
I'm using Brave with the disabled flag: disk caching when streaming video and I am currently loving it.
- Not just for memory usage that seems to be less than Safari, but also for the web-app feature that I can save a website (Discord, Messenger, and Microsoft Teams) to the Dock.
- The desktop apps run fine and fast under Rosetta, but the web-apps are much faster as the browser that runs them are Universal. They also use less RAM overall compared to their desktop counterpart and thus, less SWAP.
- Just in case anyone else uses this idea, some features are exclusive to the desktop app - such as customizing backgrounds on Teams. If you don't use these, I recommend using the web-app.
- Yes, you can save websites as an app via Safari from an external app (Flotato or Unite), but they don't run as well on WebKit as they do on Chromium.
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TheSynchronizer
macrumors 6502
Yes that’s the memory consumption of every brave process added up including all the rendering and helper engines.
Thistle41
macrumors member
*****Thistle41******
Mac Pro 2015 Big Sur 1.5 months - ~ 0.2 TBW (NB: No SMART controller present, just Activity Mon values)
MacBook Air M1 8/256 Big Sur 7.7 months old - ~ 20 TBW (NB: 2nd hand so 3 installs of OS + some other stuff)
deaglecat
macrumors 6502a
FWIW, I have just initiated a return on my 8/256. I can easily purchase again, or maybe more RAM or bigger SSD next time - once it becomes clear whether/if Apple will address this issue.
(I tend to hand Apple devices down the family, so longevity is important to me).
(I tend to hand Apple devices down the family, so longevity is important to me).
the unfortunate point is that it seems to be even Adobe m1 native apps swapping like crazy... anyone here using adobe suite can share their experience whether there has been any progress on this, please? Limiting the preview performance in LR doesn't seem like a good long term solution (having a powerful chip and restricting its use so the SSD doesn't get harmed).
No real fix yet...as I wrote before though, initial swap usage right after the reboot was improved starting from b4 or so. As soon as swap size gets > 4-5gb, it’s out of control and is swapping actively, even when memory is freed.
Maximara
macrumors 68000
osplo
macrumors 6502
Just for the record, switching from Safari is not mandatory. I have no problem at all with SSD writes and I am using Safari (and Time Machine and Spotlight and everything).
Having said that, I keep typically less than 20 tabs open at the same time.
My point is: for light to moderate office/photo/video editing usage you don't need to change anything. Just use the computer as you wish and enjoy the thing!
Maximara
macrumors 68000
I watched M1 Mac Swap Memory Issue - Is Your Browser KILLING Your Mac's SSD? and showed going with Edge or Brave resulted in near three times the information being written to SSD and yet we are seeing people here reporting the opposite. What's different?
TheSynchronizer
macrumors 6502
This is correct, and I fully agree🙂
If you're not experiencing SSD write issues, and you're using Safari, then no problem exists to fix in the first place! Keep using safari as it's a wonderful browser.
But for anyone who is experiencing SSD write issues, or is worried about potentially being affected and trying to decide whether to buy an m1 mac, alternatives and fixes do exist if they are indeed affected, so no one should be scared of buying an m1 mac if they want one.
The 14 day return period is plenty enough to test your most intensive workflow, test your browsing, and to see if excessive writing occurs (though you'd expect the first week or so to have higher writes anyway as you set your system up, so that needs to be kept in mind).
TheSynchronizer
macrumors 6502
He didn't enable buffering of videos to RAM on neither Edge nor Brave, instead he let videos buffer to disk. His main argument was that he watches a lot of youtube, and so these browsers writing so much is mainly due to that.
I've actually challenged him on this in comments, and he claimed that doing so is 'too advanced' for most users and so he wouldn't try that or take it into consideration (is pressing 'enable' on a couple of settings too advanced?). 🙄
Ironically, he did exactly that for Firefox, turned the disk caching off, so personally I think a lot of his testing methodology is flawed.
Thistle41
macrumors member
This was my thought as well. I went for Safari 100% of the time yet here we are with evidence of almost any other browser doing better.
I have also seen the threshold effect where when swap goes above a critical figure it never goes down and the SSD gets a lot of writes.
EDIT: @TheSychronizer, looks like our posts crossed. Good observation thanks.
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I tried Safari, Edge and Brave.. and I can see best results with Edge.. just watched one episode of Flash in Edge (I did read only on it's cache folder), and in that time I got less than 100mb of disk write... but the main problem for me is Adobe, hope that will be fixed soon.
gank41
macrumors 603
I bought the M1 16GB/2TB MBP to replace my dying 2015 MBPr and am very confident I’ll have this new one for 6-7 years.
deaglecat
macrumors 6502a
yeah, with that config you will have no worries - that is 2*RAM and 8*storage of my base model.
gank41
macrumors 603
I have the base model. When I first purchased it, I was affected more than anyone else here. At its worst, I was writing 1+TB day. However, I made the changes suggested in this thread. Rather than being a burden, my knowledge, computing experience, and enjoyment actually INCREASED as a result of these changes. Now, I do everything I did before (and more). In the last 24 hours, I wrote 29MB to disk. Even if my usage multiplies, I am sure I will get 10 years+, even if Apple makes no changes. If you rely on Lightroom, etc., or if you are unwilling to make changes (browser and some minor settings), then perhaps you should have pause. For all others, if you need/want a laptop, you will never look back if you get this wonderful machine.
Maximara
macrumors 68000
I have been messing with Firefox on my old Intel mac and via Stats I have noticed that compared to Safari it "lets go" of its RAM when you close a tab. I have to quit and restart Safari so that at least is on Apple (Safari has been had issues on my old 2013 iMac to the point I decided to go back to Firefox which i had left when it had become memory happy).
If Safari is going that gonzo on Intel under Catalina who knows what it is doing on M1 under Big Sur.