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Comment by e-clinton | Hacker News Reader

I’ve seen this with my M1 and M1 Pro machines. I think the biggest culprit is the RAM. 16 just isn’t enough for large workloads no matter how much faster disk IO is. Usually killing off whatever is taking the most RAM gets the machine working well again.

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It might indeed be the RAM. I've never seen this behaviour on my M1 Max with 64GB.

Classic swap fail. A good rule of thumb is that when a swapping OS runs out of RAM it literally cannot swap its way back to stability unless you kill some of the tasks.

Faster drives help a little, but the most practical option is to have enough RAM to use no swap at all.

I have a 64GB Mac and I'm regularly over 32GB. If I only had 32GB my ten core Mac would still grind to a halt.

The RAM usage on Mac is a little misleading I think. If you have lots of free RAM it will aggressively start caching stuff that could easily be offloaded if memory pressure were to increase.

That's why they promote memory pressure as a metric. Generally bad things start to happen once the graph goes into the red.

Swap helps for some use cases - the most common one being having two large programs, but only using one at a time. Imagine having Photoshop and Illustrator both open, both using 6GB of RAM on an 8GB machine - if you're only using Photoshop then the OS can swap out Illustrator's RAM to make room - but if you're actively using both that won't work.

640KB ought to be enough for anybody

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