Finding out which apps are Apple silicon ready: createdlabs.com/how-to-check-which-apps-are-apple-silicon-ready/ Use Windows on your Mac: crtd.tech/parallels My recommended Mac cleaner/optimization program: geni.us/cleanmymacx
Does the issue persist in the latest version so the MacOS like Sonoma and Ventura? Also, would you recommend using the Microsoft Edge Browser over Safari?
This was randomly recommended and I watched its entirety. I don't even have a Macbook. Edit: Welp whaddaya know. The algorithm works. I bought a macbook.
I've been thinking of getting the base model Macbook Air, and still considering the purchase because of this memory swap issue.. What's your take on this?
@@ardianthaputera6970 in my one month of usage of my base model m1 air my disk has been written for 2.13 TBs , i dont know if its bad or good but im happy with this performance laptop
This is a prime example of value-based content. UA-cam is filled with tech reviewers that follow the same god damn format as everyone else taking countless hours about leaks and wishlists that is of no use. Keep doing your thing Liam!
I am following your channel since January and I want to thank you for all the useful information and purchasing advice you gave. - Proud owner of Macbook Air M1 16GB/256GB (My first Apple Product with my own salary) ❤️
@@bthegawd8113 Actually I use it mostly for Web browsing, Video Streaming and Programming (ReactJS in VS Code), only Rosetta 2 App that I am using is Github Desktop, so my TBW is really really low. P.S. I think 16GB is an overkill, I just wanted my Macbook to be more future proof.
@@utkarsh_katiyar Hi there! Sorry. Im also wishing to buy Macbook with 16GB 256SSD just like you. However Im a vet students. Perhaps only used for microsoft word excel n etc. Web browsing. Saving the lecture notes. Is it enough for me as a student to having the 256SSD? I also wish to use this macbook over than 4-5 years perhaps.
I'm planning to buy a macbook m1, but still have doubts because of this memory swap problem. but after watching this video I feel relieved, thank you 🙌
I’ve got one and see up to 50mb swap and 10gb or less written a day and I was worried. This video and peoples comments about their usage has made me feel better about not getting 16gb(would gotten if Apple sold it in stores)
Number one thing is they cannot do 4K dual monitors unless it’s the mini. I wish I knew that when I bought my M1 MBP. I would have bought a mini. And there is virtually no difference between the MBP and the Air other than a fan that rarely if ever turns on. Outside of that, this is the best machine over owned.
*** Important UPDATE: - this bug was completely fixed in the Mac OS Big Sur 11.4 software update. This issue was caused by a data reporting error which overestimated ssd usage.
This issue is the result of a bug/oversight from Apple and not just due to unoptimised apps as you mention (even with the overhead of Rosetta) Firefox and Chrome are not optimised even on x86, but I don’t see such kind of crazy swapping even on very constrained Windows /Linux systems with 8GB of RAM or less…I also often boot up multiple VMs on my 16GB RAM equipped laptop, but never hit this level of swap
"I don't really have that many tabs open..." Proceeds to show 20 open tabs... Meanwhile me: Edge not responding when watching a YT video and only one tab open...
@@TejasGuptaMusic 2 GB RAM, 32gb emmc, baytrail z3740 it's a 2013 tablet, worth 350€ at that time. And it's even bad abused cause a lot of time usage and it's dieing. It's cause this that I criticize every machine that now cost more and can't give at least the same performance
After obsessing over these numbers for a week myself (often seeing 8+ GB swap while running my VMs), I figured it wasn’t worth the mental energy and I returned it. I’ve got a 16GB MBP on order. It’ll take 2-3 weeks to deliver but it’s worth the wait and extra cost if I don’t have to worry about it anymore for the next 5+ years before I buy another laptop
I just bought an 512ssd 8gb MacBook Pro 13”. Is this a bad decision, should I really just stretch my budget the bit I need to go to be able to get a 16gb ram?
The honesty of this video pleases me. Your advice is very important to keep M1's with 8 Gb of RAM running for many years after warranty is over. I was appalled by popular videos stating that MacOS on M1 is so memory efficient that 8Gb of RAM is enough for most tasks. Which I found strange since the RISC (M1) instruction set needs more RAM than CISC (x86) and pictures and music libraries take up the same amount of RAM on M1 as on Intel. But not mentioned is that that 'memory efficiency' is mainly by heavily applying the decades old solution of swapping contents from too small RAM to storage, the SSD. The basic M1/8Gb/256Gb Air and Pro are definitely very fast and reasonably priced, although lacking 4K displays. But I am afraid that many people will be disappointed with these particular models if not aware of your advice while using it heavily. I find it sad for used and refurb buyers and for the environment that a dead SSD renders the whole computer to scrap, knowing that the SSD and RAM cannot be replaced or expanded for commercial reasons only. Definitely not for technical reasons.
This is an amazing video. You have caused me to completely change my app routine for my M1 MacBook Pro, of which I have a 16GB, 1TB configuration. I now steer clear of Chrome and Firefox and whenever possible, and I make use of the native Apple software whenever completing routine tasks. To date I have used 0 in swap memory, and managed to have at least 3 Gbs of memory free at any given moment.
I think Apple fixed it. I'm doing light work and some Photo Editing and in the Activities, the Swap Usage is 0. Got my M1 Mac a few Days ago an heard about this Issue and checked. In the last couple of Days, the total Swap was 390mb on my Machine. Got the Base Model M1 Macbook Air.
Months ago u brought this up even before anyone else even noticed. While most reviewers were showing benchmarks and how good it is for editing...when most don't even know how to edit. You are doing great . Pls review some windows laptops as well.
On Mac Mini M1 I use Thunderbolt Samsung X5 as OS/Boot Drive - I skip using internal drive - I have a copy of MACOS on it if I ever want to re-install the OS to the X5
It is and it would make sense. memory swap is used as a way to relief the ram. when you run big tasks expect your memory to be used. Funny enough though I've got the mac book air m1 8 core CPU & GPU with 16GBS of ram and 2tbs of storage and I have had memory swap used up on me. Not much but i don't run nothing intensive in here. I keep at most 15 tabs open at all times and maybe a video here and there. Nothing a regular computer couldn't handle. my take would be seeing a m1 with 8gbs ram and 2tbs of storage lmaooo that would be funny now.
Bingo, that’s the issue. Every time he shows his browser, he has YT open. The other guys have proven that the streaming of video streams in browsers other than safari is causing caching for the video.
I can confirm this. I ended up with the same conclusion. Being a software developer it dawned on me that unoptimized apps and Rosetta 2 more than likely hammer the hardware more than the rest of the apps. As soon as I started using less of those, the machine started feeling a lot snappier, and also swap usage has decreased by a lot.
@@Jan-rn3vj unified memory does not include the solid state drive. It means the M1 design uses the ram for both CPU and GPU. Memory is used to describe ram and not a storage drive.
guess what, some chinese guys show that you can replace both RAM and SSD on the M1, it's not easy but doable, the dude upgrade from 8GB of RAM to 16GB and 1TB of SSD ! wait a few months and maybe a well documented procedure may show up on the net ;)
Hey, I just updated to macOS Big Sur 11.3 and am currently getting no swap usage at all. I have opened basically every app on my Mac and still no swap usage. This is great news! Seems like apple has addressed the issue... 😃👨🏻💻
New M1 Pro and Air user. My observation has been that Safari with a few tabs open to static pages AND Facebook resulted in over 1.5GB of swap. Switching to Brave, same tabs/pages and the Swap was under 500MB .
Obviously they are not the best engineers in the world or they would have not given you such a crap product. One good example, the butterfly keyboard, and now non-replaceable SSDs.
@@jacksongunner7122 People can hate on Apple all they want. I've been building custom PCs for over 10 years, but even though Macs have their drawbacks (I don't agree with the non-replaceable SSD), they are still great products and they've been a great tool for my business and work needs.
@@CreatedTech Exactly. When buying tech you weigh the pros and cons, and Apple as a whole do a lot of things right by a lot of people. If anything they give us a choice in a world otherwise dominated by Windows and Android but stuffed into different hardware by different brands.
Indirectly yes, since if you are not using the internal ssd for storing large files, like movies, high quality videos, then it will have more life left in it, and you will get away even with a significant amount of swap memory usage. And to be fair, most people wouldn't have to worry about swap usage at all, since the ssd will probably last you 5-6 years at bare minimum WITH swap usage, and by that time you will have bought a new MacBook or other laptop anyways. These things are meant to be used, and like everything else that's used, gets amortized. But I assure you that the lifespan of the ssd is the last thing you should worry about in the long run in these laptops.
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Not sure if I am not pushing my macbook hard enough , but that proces has only written 29GB on my Macbook . Used daily the last 4 months , Safari + Video editing (3 clip multicam footage 4k GH5) + Photo editing . But I have the 16GB Macbook Pro . Great work , love your videos
16gb explains it. I’ve had mine month with 3-10gb written daily just using it to check mail and surf web. I think with 16gb I’d probably have close to no swap. Though most time I only use 6gb of ram so I’m not sure why it swaps at all
They are Because those Macs simply don’t have enough RAM. With the new unified memory architecture by Apple CPU, GPU, T2-Chip, neural engine literally everything uses this RAM. And with all the additional background tasks running they use several GB RAM without much programs opened. Once you do some heavier tasks they swap like hell because 8 GB is simply not enough Assume this thing swaps 200 GB every day and a 500 GB ssd has 180TB tbw on average: 180.000 / 200 = 900 So in theory the ssd is Dead in 2.5 years by swap only It seems like it could get worse since the uploader had 300-500gb swap per day before
I[Developer] [PRO User] simply shutdown my M1 Mac [Air] [16GB], End of the day. shutting down is helping to keep the swap memory at bare minimums and RAM usage was about 45 to 50% at peak usage.
After 2 days of getting the M1 air, my kernel_task was 63GB, As a first time mac user. This was kinda scary so I rebooted my Mac. I realized that rebooting stops kernel_task (but till then this swap issue wasn’t out and nobody knew about this swap issue), and then for 3 months, I shut-down my laptop every other day. After 3 months I came to knew about this swap issue thingy. After so much of god damn insane usage editing video for my channel, writing blogs, USING SQUARESPACE on chrome for hours (which takes like 3gb ram, Just Squarespace.) I thought my swap data would be around 300TB+, Yes. I use my laptop like a monkey. After I checked that My overall ssd health is 99% with only 2TB data written. That’s 298TB less than what I thought. Hence: for me, rebooting everyday or once 2 days or once a week reduces swap memory data written. This is a temporary fix for now
Rebooting only ends the kernel task and resets that value in Activity Monitor, it will still write to the SSD normally when you reboot. I'm curious, what RAM and SSD size do you have?
@@CreatedTech I have 256GB M1 AIR. Imagine kernel_task is 100GB, as soon as you reboot your Mac, kernel_task resets to 0. And then it starts again from 0 If you didn’t rebooted your Mac that night, It will rewrite that 100GB from the old session + continue writing from the current session. So technically, If you don’t reboot: 100GB (rewritten) + data of current session If you reboot: 0 (written) + data, only the data of current session. It’s just what I think; and I only use native Mac apps like Xcode, safari, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, motion
I believe there was an issue in MacOS which has now been fixed. My new MacBook Air has so far only used about 800mb of swap memory in the last couple of days.
I posted in another forum noting the difference between my 2020 Intel iMac and my M1 MacBook Air. Even when using all 32GB of system memory in the desktop to run virtual machines and compress recorded videos, it does not swap any memory to the SSD. The MBA, by contrast swaps about .5 - 1.5GB of data to the SSD while I am only using 6 of the 8GB of available system memory. Someone noted that the iMac is not conserving system memory while the MBA is because the iMac does not need to. This really reiterates the point that while the M1 Macs are very impressive and very capable, they cannot truly replace a high end machine for high end workflows. For that, we do need to wait for the M1X versions.
I havent had this problem weirdly. Have had my macbook for 2 weeks almost, and it´s only written down 6.2GB on the kernel_task. I use it for streaming, editing videoes, surfing the web, writing and some light arcade gaming.
Thanks for video :) On my mini m1-16gb I use Samsung X5 as boot drive. Bit less write speed but not too noticeable. No worries and let the software wear it out. Replace with 970 Evo if slows down.
Great video! I agree, I just got a Macbook 2021, 16 GB RAM 10 core, and I just noticed the swap usage that led me here. I am going to try some of your tips!
appreciate your work! After watching all these M1 swap memory issue videos I was not sure about purchasing a new MacBook Air, but the hype got me (4 weeks ago). I updated it within the first 2 days (Version 12.2.3). I'm using Ableton and many RAM intensive plugins, all the drivers for my interfaces and the licence managers for several hours a day. I also use Skype and Discord alot. None of this runs natively and I do not have any problems so far. Maybe the update fixed it or my 16GB RAM compensate it. Just wanted to share my experience. Greetings (sorry not a native speaker)
I think the takeaway is that while it's perfectly possible to run three different browsers, each with plenty of tabs, and a load of other apps (both Apple and Intel), it's not necessarily advisable with the base model. In terms of swap, I find Edge seems quite efficient. If you're in the Microsoft Space, you can save resources by running things like Teams and Skype (both otherwise Intel based at the moment) from inside Edge. Right now, I'm running Word, OneNote, Tw@tter, Safari and Edge (both with exactly the tabs I need). 81.5MB of swap space and 1.68GB of cached files (so not too bad).
Safari (Monterey 12.1) and Chrome are both the worst offenders (M1 optimized) .. exactly the same. My guess is that internal caching of web sites using the new grouped tabs features is one of the worst culprits for me. Its related to the tabbing and caching - facility to reopen tab groups mean that in the background these things are kept "live"
Another alternative is to simply disable swap. Granted, you won't be able to multitask as well and your device will suffer more if you're editing, especially on an 8gb machine, but it is the only option that will not damage your SSD at all. I've been doing that on all my devices for years and it's perfectly fine. However, very good observation. I honestly did not think of that at all
@@96Steeve can you either give a link to this or go into vague details? I was under the impression it could only be done on linux... I tried searching it up but couldn't really find anything...
@@creenus_beenus Yeah sure thing. It's not really straightforward but I did this on my M1 air and it's perfectly fine. Basically you have to disable SIP first. you'd do that by rebooting into recovery mode (command + R), select "terminal" from the utilities window and just type in "csrutil disable". restart your mac, launch your terminal and type in "sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor=0" to completely disable swap. Here's a link to a better explained tutorial: windsketch.cc/macbook-disable-swap/
Getting the 16gb would most likely solve the problem and is the right way to do go. Swap memory is used when theres not enough RAM. In the old days this wouldve looked like an insanely sluggish system, beach balls everywhere. Instead of putting more memory into their stock systems Apple put good, fast SSDs so when it uses swap it doesnt slow down, but it kills the SSD faster instead.
I think a combination of Both because even if you get the 16 Ram, programs will use more Ram because it's available for them, i mean doing some basic work on 16gb ram laptop you might use 8 to 12. when it comes to 8gb ram, also doing basic work you will use from 5 to 7.
Apple should make an entry model with 4GB RAM at dirt cheap price. Tech reviewers will still rate it "enough for average use" and the SSD will probably fail the moment warranty expires. Aka a new computer every year. Everyone's happy!
3:21 Common misused tech term: Hard Drive only refers to the Hard Disk Drive. Meanwhile, a Drive refers to a disk drive in general which is internal storage. When referring to HDDs or SSDs in general, use *drives* instead.
Congratulations, you've managed to find the only time in the entire video I accidentally said HDD instead of SSD :) Did you not notice at 3:16 (just a few seconds before) I correctly said SSD? Simple slip of the tongue on my part.
It should be illegal for computer manufacturers to have non-removable storage for the boot volume, period. Devices should not have unserviceable batteries, nor should their parts be serialized. Just from an environmental standpoint phone and computers should not be treated as perishable items. Nice laptop, unnecessarily evil business model. Their design choices are malicious, its done only to squeeze the consumer.
It appears the swap used was 0 bytes until after sleep/wake cycle, suddenly it's increased 600MB each time. By the end of the day, 4GB of Swap was used with KernelTask process written 200GB for the day! Something is amiss in the sleep/wake cycle.
just got my m1 mac mini 16gb and I was working on an adobe premiere project and then the dreaded "your system is running out of application memory" popped up, forced me to close and I lost 5 hours of progress (even tho it auto-saved). I'm on Monterrey 12.5. Beyond annoyed.
If the arm mac lineup offers slotted/replaceable ram and ssd, I will buy them no doubt. For some people who believed that ARM chips really require different ram type and different storage type... It's a myth. As an example, a low-end chromebook has a phone-like lpddr4, and phone-like eMMc storage, and it has an x86 processor. And vice versa, an ARM server exists with full size ddr4 ECC slots on its side. And surely Tons of SSDs connected through a full-size PCIe.
DO NOT WORRY. The number is just a counter. It's not a NAND P/E counter(TLC is up to 1000 cycles per cell). It's not a NAND written bytes. 256GB SSD's TBW is between 200TB(Micron MX500) to 300TB(Samsung 970 EVO plus)
It is not worth buying an Apple product especially with lower memory and SSD capacity until the applications you use are available natively because even after your changes it is still writing a heck of a lot to the SSD. Based on my loose maths It may be three to five times less than previously but it is still likely doing a full drive of TBW every two and a half days and you are now reduced to not being able to use a lot of things that are not natively supported yet on the M1. Before your changes, it was doing up to two write cycles a day for the whole drive that would have wrecked a 256GB SSD very quickly likely in only a few years for many.
the solution: apple provides a dedicated swap drive as a user replaceable m2 on the base, shut off machine to remove magnetic locking, then unscrew the cover and change the drive. apple can force the drive being used for only swap via os level rules
or just ya know a normal replaceable m.2 (for general storage) so that when it or by change your entire machine dies you can actually get your data of it. but thats just me
@@rubenthedoornob6949 i thought about that, allowing main drives to be replaced invites all sorts of warranty issues not so with scratch drives (not to mention it does not disturb their lucrative storage upgrades)
Excellent analysis. How would a M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM swap memory performance compare with the M1 MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM you used for your testing?
You should also take a look at Apple M1 SSD Survey Results - Part 1 from Constant Geekery on UA-cam. And then especially the 7:16 Video buffering to SSD part. There you can see that even the most up-to-date version of chrome writes a lot of data to the SSD compared to Safari while streaming video (UA-cam). I always advice Mac users (especially MacBook users) to user safari for the following reasons. Better battery life Better for your privacy Syncs better with your other apple devices Support Apple Pay Has a good reader mode Handoff to other apple devices
I noticed the same change in TBW while adapting my usage to dedicated m1 apps. Also, in Chrome I have some weird audio issues while playing back videos (clipping, balance), while the same page with embedded video (tested on Vimeo and UA-cam) plays very nicely without hiccups on Safari. There is a lot of optimization to be done for the M1 yet! Even for some M1 compatible apps such as Chrome.
Google Chrome works just fine, since it's been built for M1 for a while now. Makes sense, too. Since Safari also relied on the Webkit Engine (which is used in Chrome).
The problem will be Intel apps that use JavaScript. Firefox obviously uses JavaScript, and I believe Discord is an Electron app. Intel apps are usually cross compiled by Rosetta 2 once when they're first started. Javascript is dynamically compiled, so each time Firefox uses its JIT compiler to produce Intel instructions (when you load a new web page), Rosetta 2 has to then cross compile that to Apple Silicon. I don't think apps such as Adobe apps should have the same problem, since I'd expect them to be entirely statically compiled. I don't, however, understand why this continual cross-compilation hits the swap & SSD. Maybe that is a thing that Apple can fix.
Man I have seen u grow since 2k subs and ur content was really great and also is much more useful now Thanks man I have been searching for a solution since long but haven't found any anywhere. You made my day and now those dreams of my Mac being dead after 2 years won't haunt my anymore edit: idk how it got unsubscribed so I had to re subscribe
My m1 mac mini is showing 19.81GB of kernal_task bytes written over a 7 day period. It looks like apple has fixed this, or I simply am using the correct optimized apps? I have been using this computer heavily for the past 7 days. Using browsers, GarageBand, brackets, music, etc.
Not had an issue but I use Safari and other native apps. I take the view that if you are going onto a new platform you have to go all-in, so def no non-native apps, the same as with my Surface Pro X. Get into good habits and understand this is first-gen and that if you hit issues that is to be expected. I also am a light user, the MB Air is for ultrabook workloads so ATM doing more intensive tasks with base spec will mean over-anxiety over SSD wear. If you insist on using the MB Air for heavy tasks then get 16gb/1tb as this will mean you can have 8x the read and writes compared to the base model for the same effect! I would also it exacting apps as soon as you finish using it and unlike Windows Quit it rather than just shut the window. On my Intel Mac, I use a RAM disk for Chrome cache and this limits the swap though you will need 16gb RAM to have at least 4gb in the RAM disk. I also do not cache the media when streaming, this is done through Chrome flags, so no data is written to the SSD when streaming.
I was only really worried because I had my MacBook for 2 months now and it never used ANY swap data. (My usual bites written was around 1GB per day even with apps like discord open.) It was just recently that I got parallels desktop for my Mac and all of a sudden it jumped to 200GB per day.
The whole point for those of us who use/buy MacBook Pro is precisely for graphics/art applications . To not use those apps is to basically quit being a graphic artist. Totally makes no sense. That being said I won’t add Firefox or chrome on my new m1pro Mac,. I’ll continue to use my old mbp when I need to access chrome or Firefox . Let’s hope those new machines just released will have less of an issue. Good tip on not leaving applications open when not using . I also build my website on a browser based Wordpress builder called Divi so I hope it doesn’t suck my computer dry . Hopefully using safari will prevent that .
Apple created rosetta 2, they were the ones that messed up and made it use a lot of swap memory. The x86 apps weren't using that much swap memory before.
Firefox already has an M1 optimized version, but I've been using that sparingly as video battery life is not anywhere near as good as safari. I mainly use safari as my default when not plugged in, ram usage seems similar. I've been using my m1 air (8gb) for about a week and a half and I've only written about 750GB to the SSD which seemed like a lot since I've been a fairly light user? But I did use discord heavily (rosetta) and I think that's been the culprit for most of that data, as using the web version + daily use I'm only writing about 20-30GB a day. Another tip, if you use "nativefier" (google m1 nativefier) you can create a 'web' ARM version of Discord, but as an app outside of the browser. I've been using that and there seems to be no issue leaving it open, and it doesn't impact battery life as much (while still refreshing for notifications unlike the browser-app).
No, it s not. That s the apple ''scam''. If an MacBook has 8 gb ram it will use 8 gb ram plus 2-3 gb swap. If it has 16 gb ram it will use 16 gb ram+ 2--3 gb swap.
How many TB written you got now? And still the ssd work fine? Cause I just bought a second hand MacBook air m1 that have 210 TB byte written already. And i saw that most of 256 gb ssd only have lifecycle of 150 TBW.
MacOS 12.4 - still an issue? Over 45 days, the kernel task on my M1 MacMini with a 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory has written 33.83TB of data according to the activity monitor. I think this is still an issue and not something that is going to go away any time soon.
Firstly thanks a ton for your research and info, just knowing not to install Rosetta has been really helpful as seen below. I received my M1 Mac Air on Friday afternoon, just after watching this video. It updated to 11.2.3 and time since boot is 2.5 day’s. Installed a bunch of iOS apps, MS Office (skipped OneDrive as it requires Rosetta), Affinity Photo, Little Snitch, Final Cut, Logic Pro and so on. I’m using only Safari. Swap usage is non existent, kernel task at only 4.12 GB until the test below. I hadn’t watched any UA-cam content, spent quite a few hours in Mail, Affinity Photo and Safari and quickly checking out how other apps perform. I see the pressure test in your latest video is UA-cam, so tested it just now in Safari and kernal task is going up by about 1.5GB per hour with a 1080p 60 music video constantly playing. So no problems :)
Don't feel like you can't use Rosetta or limit your use of third-party non-optimized apps. It's perfectly fine. I personally use my MacBook normally without any precautions even on apps such as Photoshop or Chrome. If you are however seeing excessive data being written there are steps you can take, but in my experience 99% of users don't have these issues. It's why I ask people to simply monitor their usage from time to time, just to double check.
Chrome has always been a memory hog. Not only will it run quadruple the memory of Safari, it will also run background crap that gobbles up even more ram.
@HN my mac came from the factory with 450gb written 800gb read and 75 cycles. Out of box from the apple website. So direct from factory to me, I was a bit upset.
I think this video is helpful. I believe the problem is real and at this point, without clarification from Apple- I would never recommend M1 machines for corporate use. Perhaps corporate groups wouldn't use these machines anyway given that memory and SSD storage is soldered on. As a personal user, with more careful selection of apps and lighter usage- I can mitigate the issue. But I am not happy that I need to do this or need to worry about a given app causing issues- particularly when these apps are widely used. Hopefully Apple will address the issue directly and make OS changes to reduce the level of disk swapping/data units written.
one of the PC expert says that increasing ram will make Mac use less swap function. But Apple made that impossible by limiting the options of ram sizes!
Yeah, this seems to be an issue for people who downloaded third-party apps back when M1 was new and support wasn't there and after that they stopped keeping their eyes on an M1 release of their software and just kept using the Rosetta 2 version. Kind of silly too, since you give up so much performance by sticking to the Rosetta 2 version. Shows how many people bought into hype without knowing what they're actually getting.
Two issues - firstly, some app developers did a horrible job of advising users to delete and re-download the new M1 version of apps. Secondly, even though some apps are now "M1 optimized", IMO many of them are barely better than they were on Rosetta 2. Firefox in particular sucks up swap memory like no tomorrow.
@@CreatedTech I agree with the first point but then again, iirc firefox did show in their update view that an M1 build is available. Not sure about Chrome or Discord, though. Most also posted it on social media. Even Microsoft's Edge did. Not much else devs can do. To point two, i can't say it uses more. It's a bit hard to gauge it objectively anyhow but a solution could be to try Firefox Nightly.
@@CreatedTech I have no swap usage when using firefox but it does buffer a videos so after few vids around 6GB written... Only safari doesnt do that but it is not working when speeding up videos
Greta video!!!! I just have one cuestión, according to The Web, Microsoft realesed a versión of office already optimized for m1 ( on december).. is that correct? Or is just they optimized it to use it with Rosetta? Thanks for all this great content!!!
Great video. Had my M1 base Air for a few weeks now and have noticed super poor battery performance during sleep. Like I'll wake up from 7 hours of sleep to see my mac drop 10%. Have you experienced this at all?
Still MacOS seems to have very poor memory management. Normally a PC shouldn’t use any swap when there is enough free RAM space. Because RAM is way faster. There is no benefit in copying data to swap partition on ssd other than when the PC needs the RAM space for something else and there is not enough free RAM left over. Every Linux OS has a 2GB swap partition where the OS can swap to by default. And I have never seen my Linux PC use this 2GB for swap because it has more than enough RAM and doesn’t need to use swap. 8:50 You can see that there are still so many tasks running in the background most eating 10-50 mb each which adds up to several GB. Additionally Apples new unified memory architecture gets rid of dedicated RAM only for GPU and other things. Now the CPU, GPU, neural engine, T2 chip and whatever all use this RAM. Simply put: Macs with 8 GB RAM dont have enough RAM for intermediate tasks unless they use swap. Never thought I’d say this but MacOS seems to be more bloated than Windows nowadays. The average 500GB NVMe SSD has an average life span of 180TB tbw. Assume the Mac swaps 200GB every day (average from this Videos before and after): 180.000 / 200 = 900 So a 500gb SSD in one of those MacBooks is essentially dead in about 2.5 years just from swap in theory. Great job
TB per two days? This is absolutely ridiculous. They need to fix swappiness. My Arch Linux with KDE Plasma Desktop wrote 0 Bytes to swap in the last two years, I have around >2000 Chromium tabs (no joke) opened while the entire time, and many other tools like Integrated Development Environments.
Lightroom is native now, it is also on the apple App Store, photoshop is also M1 native now but the dumb thing is that adobe cc desktop app is still x86 and photoshop isn’t on the App Store. And adobe cc desktop app had background tasks running through Rosetta 2. For discord, just use the browser version.
Great addition! Yesterday I have seen a video from constant geekery and they said safari may be the better browser because it doesn't use swap memory if I'm right! Me personally I'm very hyped for the 14" MacBook Pro, sadly some programs that I'm gonna use aren't supported on through Rosetta or M1 in general... But i guess due to the fact that Apple is changing their whole lineup and the recent sales, devolper are forces to support M1 :) Btw great work you are doing for the community!
thanks man, you are the saviour.. I have M1 MBP with 16GB RAM and was wondering why with browsing Tabs and Office 365 apps using Gig size of swap memory.. after stop using Chrome and going back to safari has now made a huge difference and not less than 200-300 Meg size usage for swap memory now...
600 tbw is per tb of ssd, so for a 256 gb ssd, has 150 tb allowance, or about 300 days at your previous usage. If a considerable portion of that is for applications, that means an even smaaler amount of actually storage is seeing the preassure of the swap. That does not mean it will fail at that point, however manufacturer waaranties no longer apply (of course that is irrelevant for mac as the computer dies when ssd fails, the ssd often shorts to ground, and it is then impossible to read the tbw causing failure). I was surprised at the amount of swap used on a 16gb mac mini m1. This is a design choice by apple first, and developers second. The most obvious solution is for apple to stop using 8b of unified memory, that is like buying a windows laptop with 4 or 6gb of ram (as in windows laptops video ram is usually searate). 24gb should be the base. Mac does not use memory more efficiently, rather they hide it. This gives perceived performance benefits.. With that said some apple engineered products are suberb for ram usage such as final cut pro, and some are horrible, such as adobe.
You always spot on when giving information! Btw im in buying decision, if I would produce youtube video once a week with davinci resolve with source video of 4K top, anything would be browsing, online meeting, which one should i pick, air or pro? 8 or 16 ram? Thank you mate!
Light editing once a week = go for 8GB Air. If your budget can stretch it, go for 16GB (better for editing). If you can stretch it again, go for Pro with 16GB.
@@CreatedTech really appreciate your answer in detail, mate! so better skip it to 16gb pro rather than 8gb pro? somehow my budget on 8gb pro and in your videos you mention if I'm constantly using in a day, the fan might help.
Finding out which apps are Apple silicon ready: createdlabs.com/how-to-check-which-apps-are-apple-silicon-ready/
Use Windows on your Mac: crtd.tech/parallels
My recommended Mac cleaner/optimization program: geni.us/cleanmymacx
Try the same with intel Mac with 8 gb of ram you noticed it not just m1 issue in my opinion
I have a question is Netflix app killing mac's ssd?
I use blender silicone ver but I render 4k pics and animations too at 4k60fps is it ok??? Will mac will live atleast for 7 8 yrs?? Please tell me
Does the issue persist in the latest version so the MacOS like Sonoma and Ventura? Also, would you recommend using the Microsoft Edge Browser over Safari?
This was randomly recommended and I watched its entirety. I don't even have a Macbook.
Edit: Welp whaddaya know. The algorithm works. I bought a macbook.
lmaooo
I bought one this week too lmao
Good for you bro wkwkwk
I've been thinking of getting the base model Macbook Air, and still considering the purchase because of this memory swap issue.. What's your take on this?
@@ardianthaputera6970 in my one month of usage of my base model m1 air my disk has been written for 2.13 TBs , i dont know if its bad or good but im happy with this performance laptop
This is a prime example of value-based content. UA-cam is filled with tech reviewers that follow the same god damn format as everyone else taking countless hours about leaks and wishlists that is of no use. Keep doing your thing Liam!
you look hot 💪🏻🔥
If only I could delete complete channels from youtube, it would save so much time searching.
@@ibendiben Which ones would those be, please? Then I can give them a wide berth... 😳
"Try not to use unoptimized apps"
Well, almost every app that I need is unoptimized for M1
what about now?
@@kalakaksh well a lot of time has passed, probably most of them are optimized now
I am following your channel since January and I want to thank you for all the useful information and purchasing advice you gave.
- Proud owner of Macbook Air M1 16GB/256GB (My first Apple Product with my own salary) ❤️
Great to hear! Thanks for the support!
Good choice.
Since you bought the 16GB model you wont be affected by this issue.
@@bthegawd8113 Actually I use it mostly for Web browsing, Video Streaming and Programming (ReactJS in VS Code), only Rosetta 2 App that I am using is Github Desktop, so my TBW is really really low.
P.S. I think 16GB is an overkill, I just wanted my Macbook to be more future proof.
@@utkarsh_katiyar Hi there! Sorry. Im also wishing to buy Macbook with 16GB 256SSD just like you. However Im a vet students. Perhaps only used for microsoft word excel n etc. Web browsing. Saving the lecture notes. Is it enough for me as a student to having the 256SSD? I also wish to use this macbook over than 4-5 years perhaps.
I'm planning to buy a macbook m1, but still have doubts because of this memory swap problem. but after watching this video I feel relieved, thank you 🙌
I’ve got one and see up to 50mb swap and 10gb or less written a day and I was worried. This video and peoples comments about their usage has made me feel better about not getting 16gb(would gotten if Apple sold it in stores)
Number one thing is they cannot do 4K dual monitors unless it’s the mini. I wish I knew that when I bought my M1 MBP. I would have bought a mini. And there is virtually no difference between the MBP and the Air other than a fan that rarely if ever turns on. Outside of that, this is the best machine over owned.
Get the 16 Ram version, i've made a big mistake getting the 8gb ram
@@ANAS577 NO! There is no difference between 16 and 8 gb. Straight up, no difference. Both use 2-3 gb swap memory.
That's literally a work of almost 15 days
Great work liam
*** Important UPDATE:
- this bug was completely fixed in the Mac OS Big Sur 11.4 software update. This issue was caused by a data reporting error which overestimated ssd usage.
really?
@@JVJath yes 👍
@@JVJathyes👍
@@lawrencelim6890 How do I check if my Mac is all right? I have 8gb
im on 11.6 , my Ram is screwed from Safari. I guess there is no solution
Can’t appreciate your diligence enough. You guys are like my daily apple news channel.
I got an ad for memory loss in old people before this vid started lol uhhh wrong kind of memory
oof
Same, had a good chuckle with how well UA-cam algorithms work
If only those old people had used swap memory, they wouldn't have had any issues.
I guess YT needs to work on the ML behind it's recommendation engine.
This issue is the result of a bug/oversight from Apple and not just due to unoptimised apps as you mention (even with the overhead of Rosetta) Firefox and Chrome are not optimised even on x86, but I don’t see such kind of crazy swapping even on very constrained Windows /Linux systems with 8GB of RAM or less…I also often boot up multiple VMs on my 16GB RAM equipped laptop, but never hit this level of swap
Maybe it’s on purpose to make people buy more macs
"I don't really have that many tabs open..."
Proceeds to show 20 open tabs...
Meanwhile me: Edge not responding when watching a YT video and only one tab open...
Even my T100TA of the 2013 can keep 13-20 Edge tab opened. You should make some check on your device
@@lucabastianello9830 How much ram? And what processor? And hdd or ssd?
@@TejasGuptaMusic 2 GB RAM, 32gb emmc, baytrail z3740 it's a 2013 tablet, worth 350€ at that time. And it's even bad abused cause a lot of time usage and it's dieing. It's cause this that I criticize every machine that now cost more and can't give at least the same performance
@@alex_schwartz Yes. I'm still using an hdd 😑
@@lucabastianello9830 Oh...running windows 10?
After obsessing over these numbers for a week myself (often seeing 8+ GB swap while running my VMs), I figured it wasn’t worth the mental energy and I returned it. I’ve got a 16GB MBP on order. It’ll take 2-3 weeks to deliver but it’s worth the wait and extra cost if I don’t have to worry about it anymore for the next 5+ years before I buy another laptop
I just bought an 512ssd 8gb MacBook Pro 13”. Is this a bad decision, should I really just stretch my budget the bit I need to go to be able to get a 16gb ram?
The honesty of this video pleases me. Your advice is very important to keep M1's with 8 Gb of RAM running for many years after warranty is over.
I was appalled by popular videos stating that MacOS on M1 is so memory efficient that 8Gb of RAM is enough for most tasks. Which I found strange since the RISC (M1) instruction set needs more RAM than CISC (x86) and pictures and music libraries take up the same amount of RAM on M1 as on Intel. But not mentioned is that that 'memory efficiency' is mainly by heavily applying the decades old solution of swapping contents from too small RAM to storage, the SSD. The basic M1/8Gb/256Gb Air and Pro are definitely very fast and reasonably priced, although lacking 4K displays. But I am afraid that many people will be disappointed with these particular models if not aware of your advice while using it heavily. I find it sad for used and refurb buyers and for the environment that a dead SSD renders the whole computer to scrap, knowing that the SSD and RAM cannot be replaced or expanded for commercial reasons only. Definitely not for technical reasons.
This is an amazing video. You have caused me to completely change my app routine for my M1 MacBook Pro, of which I have a 16GB, 1TB configuration. I now steer clear of Chrome and Firefox and whenever possible, and I make use of the native Apple software whenever completing routine tasks. To date I have used 0 in swap memory, and managed to have at least 3 Gbs of memory free at any given moment.
I think Apple fixed it. I'm doing light work and some Photo Editing and in the Activities, the Swap Usage is 0. Got my M1 Mac a few Days ago an heard about this Issue and checked. In the last couple of Days, the total Swap was 390mb on my Machine. Got the Base Model M1 Macbook Air.
Months ago u brought this up even before anyone else even noticed. While most reviewers were showing benchmarks and how good it is for editing...when most don't even know how to edit.
You are doing great . Pls review some windows laptops as well.
On Mac Mini M1 I use Thunderbolt Samsung X5 as OS/Boot Drive - I skip using internal drive - I have a copy of MACOS on it if I ever want to re-install the OS to the X5
I just downloaded ram from the internet and now I have additional 32 Gigs. Hope it reduces swap usage.
It would be interesting to compare again the 8 vs 16gb version with only m1 apps and see if the swap memory is higher on the 8gb model.
It is and it would make sense. memory swap is used as a way to relief the ram. when you run big tasks expect your memory to be used. Funny enough though I've got the mac book air m1 8 core CPU & GPU with 16GBS of ram and 2tbs of storage and I have had memory swap used up on me. Not much but i don't run nothing intensive in here. I keep at most 15 tabs open at all times and maybe a video here and there. Nothing a regular computer couldn't handle. my take would be seeing a m1 with 8gbs ram and 2tbs of storage lmaooo that would be funny now.
@@13gta do you know a method to run a process entirely in ram? i do need a process to be fast and it seems ssd swap is reducing speed
If you watch streaming video (UA-cam, Amazon Prime, Netflix), most browsers constantly write to the SSD, Safari doesn't do that.
Bingo, that’s the issue. Every time he shows his browser, he has YT open. The other guys have proven that the streaming of video streams in browsers other than safari is causing caching for the video.
@@DylanDurdle Not terabytes a day though, which is what some people reported.
@@cppguy16 incorrect. One of the videos showed watching 4K YT videos generated 300gb in 3 hours.
How safari not do that they all say safari do write on add more ??
I can confirm this. I ended up with the same conclusion. Being a software developer it dawned on me that unoptimized apps and Rosetta 2 more than likely hammer the hardware more than the rest of the apps. As soon as I started using less of those, the machine started feeling a lot snappier, and also swap usage has decreased by a lot.
I’m curious, what apps were/are you using?
@@OrincyWhyteDesigns Yes, I too would like to know this!
This would be that much of a concern if Apple had put in a replaceable SSD.
Then the whole unified memory thing wouldn't be a thing at all AFAIK
@@Jan-rn3vj unified memory does not include the solid state drive. It means the M1 design uses the ram for both CPU and GPU. Memory is used to describe ram and not a storage drive.
guess what, some chinese guys show that you can replace both RAM and SSD on the M1, it's not easy but doable, the dude upgrade from 8GB of RAM to 16GB and 1TB of SSD ! wait a few months and maybe a well documented procedure may show up on the net ;)
Hey,
I just updated to macOS Big Sur 11.3 and am currently getting no swap usage at all. I have opened basically every app on my Mac and still no swap usage. This is great news! Seems like apple has addressed the issue... 😃👨🏻💻
Good to know!
for real ? I got 3% already after 3 months
*COMMENT below if you've experienced similar swap issues or you have any additional insight!*
pls test Brave Browser It's perfect, you won't believe my words. The further experience is a big difference between other browsers
@@mohamedadnan7310 Have you compared Brave with Edge? I had a similar experience with that switch, when coming from Chrome.
Hi, great video. I thought Firefox since version 84 had native M1 support?
@@gigathlete2277 yeah firefox is M1 app
Firefox has aarch64 support (just to correct you)
New M1 Pro and Air user. My observation has been that Safari with a few tabs open to static pages AND Facebook resulted in over 1.5GB of swap. Switching to Brave, same tabs/pages and the Swap was under 500MB .
Must be Facebook. I use Safari for UA-cam(2-5) and other sites and at most get 50mb swap. With mail or chrome open too
@@sly2792004 I'm sure that it is Facebook. However, the condition doesn't manifest using Brave browser.
@@DannyThompson54 what's brave browser and who runs it?
Thousands of the best engineers of the world vs. one Aussie tinkerer. Who might know best?
It's the kangaroo juice mate, makes us think harder
@@CreatedTech shhhh don't give away our secret sauce
Obviously they are not the best engineers in the world or they would have not given you such a crap product. One good example, the butterfly keyboard, and now non-replaceable SSDs.
@@jacksongunner7122 People can hate on Apple all they want. I've been building custom PCs for over 10 years, but even though Macs have their drawbacks (I don't agree with the non-replaceable SSD), they are still great products and they've been a great tool for my business and work needs.
@@CreatedTech Exactly. When buying tech you weigh the pros and cons, and Apple as a whole do a lot of things right by a lot of people. If anything they give us a choice in a world otherwise dominated by Windows and Android but stuffed into different hardware by different brands.
Does an external SSD (like the M.2 that you made a video about) would help reducing the damages to the internal SSD ?
Thanks for all the videos 😉
No
Indirectly yes, since if you are not using the internal ssd for storing large files, like movies, high quality videos, then it will have more life left in it, and you will get away even with a significant amount of swap memory usage. And to be fair, most people wouldn't have to worry about swap usage at all, since the ssd will probably last you 5-6 years at bare minimum WITH swap usage, and by that time you will have bought a new MacBook or other laptop anyways. These things are meant to be used, and like everything else that's used, gets amortized. But I assure you that the lifespan of the ssd is the last thing you should worry about in the long run in these laptops.
Not sure if I am not pushing my macbook hard enough , but that proces has only written 29GB on my Macbook . Used daily the last 4 months , Safari + Video editing (3 clip multicam footage 4k GH5) + Photo editing . But I have the 16GB Macbook Pro . Great work , love your videos
16gb explains it. I’ve had mine month with 3-10gb written daily just using it to check mail and surf web. I think with 16gb I’d probably have close to no swap. Though most time I only use 6gb of ram so I’m not sure why it swaps at all
I have a Samsung SSD as my Windows/Apps system drive and I have only 42.3TB written in 6 YEARS, lol. These numbers on the M1 are insane!
They are
Because those Macs simply don’t have enough RAM.
With the new unified memory architecture by Apple CPU, GPU, T2-Chip, neural engine literally everything uses this RAM.
And with all the additional background tasks running they use several GB RAM without much programs opened.
Once you do some heavier tasks they swap like hell because 8 GB is simply not enough
Assume this thing swaps 200 GB every day and a 500 GB ssd has 180TB tbw on average:
180.000 / 200 = 900
So in theory the ssd is Dead in 2.5 years by swap only
It seems like it could get worse since the uploader had 300-500gb swap per day before
Hi,same issue here with 2015 MBP and OS Big Sur...
I[Developer] [PRO User] simply shutdown my M1 Mac [Air] [16GB], End of the day. shutting down is helping to keep the swap memory at bare minimums and RAM usage was about 45 to 50% at peak usage.
Which most user using m1 device won't do. Apple has make shutting down the computer less convenient than before.
After 2 days of getting the M1 air, my kernel_task was 63GB, As a first time mac user. This was kinda scary so I rebooted my Mac. I realized that rebooting stops kernel_task (but till then this swap issue wasn’t out and nobody knew about this swap issue), and then for 3 months, I shut-down my laptop every other day.
After 3 months I came to knew about this swap issue thingy. After so much of god damn insane usage editing video for my channel, writing blogs, USING SQUARESPACE on chrome for hours (which takes like 3gb ram, Just Squarespace.)
I thought my swap data would be around 300TB+, Yes. I use my laptop like a monkey.
After I checked that
My overall ssd health is 99% with only 2TB data written. That’s 298TB less than what I thought.
Hence: for me, rebooting everyday or once 2 days or once a week reduces swap memory data written. This is a temporary fix for now
Is that bad 99% ?
Rebooting only ends the kernel task and resets that value in Activity Monitor, it will still write to the SSD normally when you reboot. I'm curious, what RAM and SSD size do you have?
@@CreatedTech I have 256GB M1 AIR.
Imagine kernel_task is 100GB, as soon as you reboot your Mac, kernel_task resets to 0. And then it starts again from 0
If you didn’t rebooted your Mac that night, It will rewrite that 100GB from the old session + continue writing from the current session.
So technically,
If you don’t reboot: 100GB (rewritten) + data of current session
If you reboot: 0 (written) + data, only the data of current session.
It’s just what I think; and I only use native Mac apps like Xcode, safari, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, motion
I believe there was an issue in MacOS which has now been fixed. My new MacBook Air has so far only used about 800mb of swap memory in the last couple of days.
Really??? If that’s true, I’ll be so relieved and buy Macbook Air immediately
Btw, may i ask you what version your macbook is? (8 or 16gb ram) ( sorry about my grammar )
@@leuchung5440 11.5.2
@@PaulHojda How do you check total swap memory used?
The commitment to make such video is remarkable! Great job 🙏
I posted in another forum noting the difference between my 2020 Intel iMac and my M1 MacBook Air. Even when using all 32GB of system memory in the desktop to run virtual machines and compress recorded videos, it does not swap any memory to the SSD. The MBA, by contrast swaps about .5 - 1.5GB of data to the SSD while I am only using 6 of the 8GB of available system memory. Someone noted that the iMac is not conserving system memory while the MBA is because the iMac does not need to. This really reiterates the point that while the M1 Macs are very impressive and very capable, they cannot truly replace a high end machine for high end workflows. For that, we do need to wait for the M1X versions.
I havent had this problem weirdly. Have had my macbook for 2 weeks almost, and it´s only written down 6.2GB on the kernel_task. I use it for streaming, editing videoes, surfing the web, writing and some light arcade gaming.
do u have an 8gb ram or 16gb ram model?
@@creenus_beenus 8gb
This proves some ppl are just getting defective macbooks or its some non-optimized program slowly killing the ssd
how can you check the bytes written in the activity monitor? I have it open but don't see that column
@@jerrystation You got to add it by right clicking in the top bar where the other info´s are written.
Da Vinci Resolve 17 and Photoshop has now been optimised for M1 as of last week itself so won't be any trouble using those apps anymore ^-^
Thanks for video :)
On my mini m1-16gb I use Samsung X5 as boot drive. Bit less write speed but not too noticeable.
No worries and let the software wear it out. Replace with 970 Evo if slows down.
Can you help me out regarding this? Want same setup as yours
Great video! I agree, I just got a Macbook 2021, 16 GB RAM 10 core, and I just noticed the swap usage that led me here. I am going to try some of your tips!
appreciate your work!
After watching all these M1 swap memory issue videos I was not sure about purchasing a new MacBook Air, but the hype got me (4 weeks ago). I updated it within the first 2 days (Version 12.2.3). I'm using Ableton and many RAM intensive plugins, all the drivers for my interfaces and the licence managers for several hours a day. I also use Skype and Discord alot. None of this runs natively and I do not have any problems so far. Maybe the update fixed it or my 16GB RAM compensate it. Just wanted to share my experience. Greetings (sorry not a native speaker)
I think the takeaway is that while it's perfectly possible to run three different browsers, each with plenty of tabs, and a load of other apps (both Apple and Intel), it's not necessarily advisable with the base model. In terms of swap, I find Edge seems quite efficient. If you're in the Microsoft Space, you can save resources by running things like Teams and Skype (both otherwise Intel based at the moment) from inside Edge. Right now, I'm running Word, OneNote, Tw@tter, Safari and Edge (both with exactly the tabs I need). 81.5MB of swap space and 1.68GB of cached files (so not too bad).
Safari (Monterey 12.1) and Chrome are both the worst offenders (M1 optimized) .. exactly the same. My guess is that internal caching of web sites using the new grouped tabs features is one of the worst culprits for me.
Its related to the tabbing and caching - facility to reopen tab groups mean that in the background these things are kept "live"
Another alternative is to simply disable swap. Granted, you won't be able to multitask as well and your device will suffer more if you're editing, especially on an 8gb machine, but it is the only option that will not damage your SSD at all. I've been doing that on all my devices for years and it's perfectly fine. However, very good observation. I honestly did not think of that at all
I dont think that there is a way to do that on macbooks though
@@creenus_beenus There is.. I am a mac user and I do this on every device I own
@@96Steeve can you either give a link to this or go into vague details? I was under the impression it could only be done on linux... I tried searching it up but couldn't really find anything...
@@creenus_beenus Yeah sure thing. It's not really straightforward but I did this on my M1 air and it's perfectly fine. Basically you have to disable SIP first. you'd do that by rebooting into recovery mode (command + R), select "terminal" from the utilities window and just type in "csrutil disable". restart your mac, launch your terminal and type in "sudo nvram boot-args="vm_compressor=0" to completely disable swap.
Here's a link to a better explained tutorial: windsketch.cc/macbook-disable-swap/
this will allow oom killers to kill relevant processes and lock up the system when a single process tries to overcommit memory. disabling swap is bad.
Would getting the 16gb M1 help? Or the larger SSD? Great video, been watching a lot your content since I got a Mac last Sunday.
Good question...I had that question too
Getting the 16gb would most likely solve the problem and is the right way to do go. Swap memory is used when theres not enough RAM. In the old days this wouldve looked like an insanely sluggish system, beach balls everywhere. Instead of putting more memory into their stock systems Apple put good, fast SSDs so when it uses swap it doesnt slow down, but it kills the SSD faster instead.
I think a combination of Both because even if you get the 16 Ram, programs will use more Ram because it's available for them, i mean doing some basic work on 16gb ram laptop you might use 8 to 12.
when it comes to 8gb ram, also doing basic work you will use from 5 to 7.
Apple should make an entry model with 4GB RAM at dirt cheap price. Tech reviewers will still rate it "enough for average use" and the SSD will probably fail the moment warranty expires. Aka a new computer every year. Everyone's happy!
3:21 Common misused tech term: Hard Drive only refers to the Hard Disk Drive. Meanwhile, a Drive refers to a disk drive in general which is internal storage. When referring to HDDs or SSDs in general, use *drives* instead.
Congratulations, you've managed to find the only time in the entire video I accidentally said HDD instead of SSD :) Did you not notice at 3:16 (just a few seconds before) I correctly said SSD? Simple slip of the tongue on my part.
@@CreatedTech understandable
it’s been six months, has the issue been fixed by Apple?
It should be illegal for computer manufacturers to have non-removable storage for the boot volume, period. Devices should not have unserviceable batteries, nor should their parts be serialized. Just from an environmental standpoint phone and computers should not be treated as perishable items.
Nice laptop, unnecessarily evil business model. Their design choices are malicious, its done only to squeeze the consumer.
It appears the swap used was 0 bytes until after sleep/wake cycle, suddenly it's increased 600MB each time. By the end of the day, 4GB of Swap was used with KernelTask process written 200GB for the day!
Something is amiss in the sleep/wake cycle.
just got my m1 mac mini 16gb and I was working on an adobe premiere project and then the dreaded "your system is running out of application memory" popped up, forced me to close and I lost 5 hours of progress (even tho it auto-saved). I'm on Monterrey 12.5. Beyond annoyed.
If the arm mac lineup offers slotted/replaceable ram and ssd, I will buy them no doubt.
For some people who believed that ARM chips really require different ram type and different storage type... It's a myth. As an example, a low-end chromebook has a phone-like lpddr4, and phone-like eMMc storage, and it has an x86 processor. And vice versa, an ARM server exists with full size ddr4 ECC slots on its side. And surely Tons of SSDs connected through a full-size PCIe.
DO NOT WORRY.
The number is just a counter. It's not a NAND P/E counter(TLC is up to 1000 cycles per cell). It's not a NAND written bytes. 256GB SSD's TBW is between 200TB(Micron MX500) to 300TB(Samsung 970 EVO plus)
It is not worth buying an Apple product especially with lower memory and SSD capacity until the applications you use are available natively because even after your changes it is still writing a heck of a lot to the SSD. Based on my loose maths It may be three to five times less than previously but it is still likely doing a full drive of TBW every two and a half days and you are now reduced to not being able to use a lot of things that are not natively supported yet on the M1. Before your changes, it was doing up to two write cycles a day for the whole drive that would have wrecked a 256GB SSD very quickly likely in only a few years for many.
the solution: apple provides a dedicated swap drive as a user replaceable m2 on the base, shut off machine to remove magnetic locking, then unscrew the cover and change the drive. apple can force the drive being used for only swap via os level rules
or just ya know a normal replaceable m.2 (for general storage) so that when it or by change your entire machine dies you can actually get your data of it. but thats just me
@@rubenthedoornob6949 i thought about that, allowing main drives to be replaced invites all sorts of warranty issues not so with scratch drives (not to mention it does not disturb their lucrative storage upgrades)
Excellent analysis. How would a M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB RAM swap memory performance compare with the M1 MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM you used for your testing?
Constant Geeker did a vid about that. Its about half the amount for a 16gb vs 8gb version
Way better. I have the pro with 16GB and I just got 1.9 TB SSD usage after almost 2 months with many apps installed etc.
You should also take a look at Apple M1 SSD Survey Results - Part 1 from Constant Geekery on UA-cam. And then especially the 7:16 Video buffering to SSD part. There you can see that even the most up-to-date version of chrome writes a lot of data to the SSD compared to Safari while streaming video (UA-cam). I always advice Mac users (especially MacBook users) to user safari for the following reasons.
Better battery life
Better for your privacy
Syncs better with your other apple devices
Support Apple Pay
Has a good reader mode
Handoff to other apple devices
also its faster
@@chidorirasenganz true, should have added it to my list :D
@@Visualization1 it’s all good you got the rest 😂
I noticed the same change in TBW while adapting my usage to dedicated m1 apps.
Also, in Chrome I have some weird audio issues while playing back videos (clipping, balance), while the same page with embedded video (tested on Vimeo and UA-cam) plays very nicely without hiccups on Safari.
There is a lot of optimization to be done for the M1 yet! Even for some M1 compatible apps such as Chrome.
Google Chrome works just fine, since it's been built for M1 for a while now. Makes sense, too. Since Safari also relied on the Webkit Engine (which is used in Chrome).
@Tronam i was actually wrong, apparently. Chrome doesn't use WebKit anymore. Blink is a fork of WebKit but I assume it's substantially different
My m1 is running out of aplicación memory just with a few safari taps opened
perfect investigation sir Sherlock, informative and well made. usefull stuff.
Note to self: Use Native M1 Apps, Rosetta 2 might be causing high swap usage
The problem will be Intel apps that use JavaScript. Firefox obviously uses JavaScript, and I believe Discord is an Electron app.
Intel apps are usually cross compiled by Rosetta 2 once when they're first started. Javascript is dynamically compiled, so each time Firefox uses its JIT compiler to produce Intel instructions (when you load a new web page), Rosetta 2 has to then cross compile that to Apple Silicon.
I don't think apps such as Adobe apps should have the same problem, since I'd expect them to be entirely statically compiled.
I don't, however, understand why this continual cross-compilation hits the swap & SSD. Maybe that is a thing that Apple can fix.
Man I have seen u grow since 2k subs and ur content was really great and also is much more useful now Thanks man I have been searching for a solution since long but haven't found any anywhere. You made my day and now those dreams of my Mac being dead after 2 years won't haunt my anymore
edit: idk how it got unsubscribed so I had to re subscribe
Photoshop is updated for M1 now, but not Lightroom Classic. And that’s what I use the most. *sigh*
1:41 Bahah definitely not because people have pointed out “2:43am” in past screen recordings. Great video mate👌
I will not be judged for my sleeping pattern!
My m1 mac mini is showing 19.81GB of kernal_task bytes written over a 7 day period. It looks like apple has fixed this, or I simply am using the correct optimized apps? I have been using this computer heavily for the past 7 days. Using browsers, GarageBand, brackets, music, etc.
Not had an issue but I use Safari and other native apps. I take the view that if you are going onto a new platform you have to go all-in, so def no non-native apps, the same as with my Surface Pro X. Get into good habits and understand this is first-gen and that if you hit issues that is to be expected. I also am a light user, the MB Air is for ultrabook workloads so ATM doing more intensive tasks with base spec will mean over-anxiety over SSD wear. If you insist on using the MB Air for heavy tasks then get 16gb/1tb as this will mean you can have 8x the read and writes compared to the base model for the same effect!
I would also it exacting apps as soon as you finish using it and unlike Windows Quit it rather than just shut the window. On my Intel Mac, I use a RAM disk for Chrome cache and this limits the swap though you will need 16gb RAM to have at least 4gb in the RAM disk. I also do not cache the media when streaming, this is done through Chrome flags, so no data is written to the SSD when streaming.
I was only really worried because I had my MacBook for 2 months now and it never used ANY swap data. (My usual bites written was around 1GB per day even with apps like discord open.) It was just recently that I got parallels desktop for my Mac and all of a sudden it jumped to 200GB per day.
I was interested in getting an M1 MacBook, But I don't want compromises :( im sad
Do it. The M1 is fantastic. Just shut down the third party apps when not using them.
The whole point for those of us who use/buy MacBook Pro is precisely for graphics/art applications . To not use those apps is to basically quit being a graphic artist. Totally makes no sense. That being said I won’t add Firefox or chrome on my new m1pro Mac,. I’ll continue to use my old mbp when I need to access chrome or Firefox . Let’s hope those new machines just released will have less of an issue. Good tip on not leaving applications open when not using . I also build my website on a browser based Wordpress builder called Divi so I hope it doesn’t suck my computer dry . Hopefully using safari will prevent that .
This video is over 6 months old, Apple has made multiple updates and you no longer need to worry.
@@CreatedTech so I can safely install Firefox to access my bookmarks on the new machine ?
@@JanineMKartist Yes, shouldn't be an issue.
Great job. Are you planning a video on "Apple M1 Exposes Vulnerability Against Javascript-Free Side-Channel Attacks"?
Apple created rosetta 2, they were the ones that messed up and made it use a lot of swap memory.
The x86 apps weren't using that much swap memory before.
So, does it only happens with apps that are not compatible with M1 chips? I want to buy an M1 MBA but this problem is scaring me. 🙁
Firefox already has an M1 optimized version, but I've been using that sparingly as video battery life is not anywhere near as good as safari. I mainly use safari as my default when not plugged in, ram usage seems similar. I've been using my m1 air (8gb) for about a week and a half and I've only written about 750GB to the SSD which seemed like a lot since I've been a fairly light user? But I did use discord heavily (rosetta) and I think that's been the culprit for most of that data, as using the web version + daily use I'm only writing about 20-30GB a day. Another tip, if you use "nativefier" (google m1 nativefier) you can create a 'web' ARM version of Discord, but as an app outside of the browser. I've been using that and there seems to be no issue leaving it open, and it doesn't impact battery life as much (while still refreshing for notifications unlike the browser-app).
This is probably pretty heavily reduced on the 16GB models because less swapping is required. ARM apps use less ram.
No, it s not. That s the apple ''scam''.
If an MacBook has 8 gb ram it will use 8 gb ram plus 2-3 gb swap. If it has 16 gb ram it will use 16 gb ram+ 2--3 gb swap.
@@adrian1622 should i go for 16 gb ornot ?
I have a year old Intel MBP 16" and my TBW is 157 TB... So, it doesn't look like this problem is really limited to M1 Macs. :)
How many TB written you got now? And still the ssd work fine? Cause I just bought a second hand MacBook air m1 that have 210 TB byte written already. And i saw that most of 256 gb ssd only have lifecycle of 150 TBW.
MacOS 12.4 - still an issue? Over 45 days, the kernel task on my M1 MacMini with a 1TB SSD and 16GB of memory has written 33.83TB of data according to the activity monitor. I think this is still an issue and not something that is going to go away any time soon.
Firstly thanks a ton for your research and info, just knowing not to install Rosetta has been really helpful as seen below. I received my M1 Mac Air on Friday afternoon, just after watching this video. It updated to 11.2.3 and time since boot is 2.5 day’s.
Installed a bunch of iOS apps, MS Office (skipped OneDrive as it requires Rosetta), Affinity Photo, Little Snitch, Final Cut, Logic Pro and so on. I’m using only Safari. Swap usage is non existent, kernel task at only 4.12 GB until the test below. I hadn’t watched any UA-cam content, spent quite a few hours in Mail, Affinity Photo and Safari and quickly checking out how other apps perform.
I see the pressure test in your latest video is UA-cam, so tested it just now in Safari and kernal task is going up by about 1.5GB per hour with a 1080p 60 music video constantly playing. So no problems :)
Don't feel like you can't use Rosetta or limit your use of third-party non-optimized apps. It's perfectly fine. I personally use my MacBook normally without any precautions even on apps such as Photoshop or Chrome.
If you are however seeing excessive data being written there are steps you can take, but in my experience 99% of users don't have these issues. It's why I ask people to simply monitor their usage from time to time, just to double check.
@@CreatedTech yeah, I'll still avoid it. As it is it's super efficient, the Air is tremendous value.
Chrome has always been a memory hog. Not only will it run quadruple the memory of Safari, it will also run background crap that gobbles up even more ram.
@HN my mac came from the factory with 450gb written 800gb read and 75 cycles. Out of box from the apple website. So direct from factory to me, I was a bit upset.
I think this video is helpful. I believe the problem is real and at this point, without clarification from Apple- I would never recommend M1 machines for corporate use. Perhaps corporate groups wouldn't use these machines anyway given that memory and SSD storage is soldered on. As a personal user, with more careful selection of apps and lighter usage- I can mitigate the issue. But I am not happy that I need to do this or need to worry about a given app causing issues- particularly when these apps are widely used. Hopefully Apple will address the issue directly and make OS changes to reduce the level of disk swapping/data units written.
one of the PC expert says that increasing ram will make Mac use less swap function. But Apple made that impossible by limiting the options of ram sizes!
Mozilla released a native m1 version of Firefox on December 15, 2020. Nice video by the way. Thank you!
Yeah, this seems to be an issue for people who downloaded third-party apps back when M1 was new and support wasn't there and after that they stopped keeping their eyes on an M1 release of their software and just kept using the Rosetta 2 version.
Kind of silly too, since you give up so much performance by sticking to the Rosetta 2 version. Shows how many people bought into hype without knowing what they're actually getting.
Two issues - firstly, some app developers did a horrible job of advising users to delete and re-download the new M1 version of apps. Secondly, even though some apps are now "M1 optimized", IMO many of them are barely better than they were on Rosetta 2. Firefox in particular sucks up swap memory like no tomorrow.
@@CreatedTech I agree with the first point but then again, iirc firefox did show in their update view that an M1 build is available. Not sure about Chrome or Discord, though. Most also posted it on social media. Even Microsoft's Edge did. Not much else devs can do.
To point two, i can't say it uses more. It's a bit hard to gauge it objectively anyhow but a solution could be to try Firefox Nightly.
@@CreatedTech I have no swap usage when using firefox but it does buffer a videos so after few vids around 6GB written... Only safari doesnt do that but it is not working when speeding up videos
Greta video!!!! I just have one cuestión, according to The Web, Microsoft realesed a versión of office already optimized for m1 ( on december).. is that correct? Or is just they optimized it to use it with Rosetta?
Thanks for all this great content!!!
Great video. Had my M1 base Air for a few weeks now and have noticed super poor battery performance during sleep. Like I'll wake up from 7 hours of sleep to see my mac drop 10%. Have you experienced this at all?
Why only 57.2 subscribers? C'mon guys he deserves minimum 570K subs now considering the quality of the contents. Let's get the subs up
@Devilley sorry Einstein. Missed out the k. Regardless, that's about 500K subs short of what it should be - that's what I meant genius.
Still MacOS seems to have very poor memory management.
Normally a PC shouldn’t use any swap when there is enough free RAM space.
Because RAM is way faster. There is no benefit in copying data to swap partition on ssd other than when the PC needs the RAM space for something else and there is not enough free RAM left over.
Every Linux OS has a 2GB swap partition where the OS can swap to by default.
And I have never seen my Linux PC use this 2GB for swap because it has more than enough RAM and doesn’t need to use swap.
8:50 You can see that there are still so many tasks running in the background most eating 10-50 mb each which adds up to several GB.
Additionally Apples new unified memory architecture gets rid of dedicated RAM only for GPU and other things.
Now the CPU, GPU, neural engine, T2 chip and whatever all use this RAM.
Simply put: Macs with 8 GB RAM dont have enough RAM for intermediate tasks unless they use swap.
Never thought I’d say this but MacOS seems to be more bloated than Windows nowadays.
The average 500GB NVMe SSD has an average life span of 180TB tbw.
Assume the Mac swaps 200GB every day (average from this Videos before and after):
180.000 / 200 = 900
So a 500gb SSD in one of those MacBooks is essentially dead in about 2.5 years just from swap in theory.
Great job
TB per two days? This is absolutely ridiculous. They need to fix swappiness. My Arch Linux with KDE Plasma Desktop wrote 0 Bytes to swap in the last two years, I have around >2000 Chromium tabs (no joke) opened while the entire time, and many other tools like Integrated Development Environments.
I just use whatever App I need. I’ve never traded my Macs as if they were raw eggs and never had problems with any of them.
Lightroom is native now, it is also on the apple App Store, photoshop is also M1 native now but the dumb thing is that adobe cc desktop app is still x86 and photoshop isn’t on the App Store. And adobe cc desktop app had background tasks running through Rosetta 2. For discord, just use the browser version.
Just Lightroom not Lightroom Classic
Firefox has been Native since v84 in released mid December
Great addition! Yesterday I have seen a video from constant geekery and they said safari may be the better browser because it doesn't use swap memory if I'm right!
Me personally I'm very hyped for the 14" MacBook Pro, sadly some programs that I'm gonna use aren't supported on through Rosetta or M1 in general... But i guess due to the fact that Apple is changing their whole lineup and the recent sales, devolper are forces to support M1 :)
Btw great work you are doing for the community!
At least photoshop and word both got native apple silicon support now. Hope lightroom classic will follow up.
100GB of swap memory used - still insane amount per day...
or just don't use all the apps at once-
Is it solved now in Aug 2022?
thanks man, you are the saviour.. I have M1 MBP with 16GB RAM and was wondering why with browsing Tabs and Office 365 apps using Gig size of swap memory.. after stop using Chrome and going back to safari has now made a huge difference and not less than 200-300 Meg size usage for swap memory now...
Will the decreased usage of swap in the latest version MacOS have an performance impact which makes previous M1 Mac speedtests and reviews unreliable?
It just matters if those tests and benchmarks and work flows were "m1 optimized" or not.
600 tbw is per tb of ssd, so for a 256 gb ssd, has 150 tb allowance, or about 300 days at your previous usage. If a considerable portion of that is for applications, that means an even smaaler amount of actually storage is seeing the preassure of the swap. That does not mean it will fail at that point, however manufacturer waaranties no longer apply (of course that is irrelevant for mac as the computer dies when ssd fails, the ssd often shorts to ground, and it is then impossible to read the tbw causing failure). I was surprised at the amount of swap used on a 16gb mac mini m1.
This is a design choice by apple first, and developers second. The most obvious solution is for apple to stop using 8b of unified memory, that is like buying a windows laptop with 4 or 6gb of ram (as in windows laptops video ram is usually searate). 24gb should be the base. Mac does not use memory more efficiently, rather they hide it. This gives perceived performance benefits.. With that said some apple engineered products are suberb for ram usage such as final cut pro, and some are horrible, such as adobe.
You always spot on when giving information!
Btw im in buying decision, if I would produce youtube video once a week with davinci resolve with source video of 4K top, anything would be browsing, online meeting, which one should i pick, air or pro? 8 or 16 ram? Thank you mate!
Light editing once a week = go for 8GB Air. If your budget can stretch it, go for 16GB (better for editing). If you can stretch it again, go for Pro with 16GB.
@@CreatedTech really appreciate your answer in detail, mate! so better skip it to 16gb pro rather than 8gb pro? somehow my budget on 8gb pro and in your videos you mention if I'm constantly using in a day, the fan might help.
My biggest issue with non-M1-optimized apps is Dropbox being Intel based. :(
Agree