Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 342 posts

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#71

Post by rnestler »

danielparks wrote: post #3

There’s more information, including a copy of the image, in the forum discussion. The forum seems a bit pokey for me at the moment, though. https://forums.flyingmeat.com/t/memory-consumption-when-open... Gus Mueller (the author of the linked tweet) is the author of the Acorn image editor.

Thanks for the link. The issue seems to be the IOAccelerator framework:

> I’ve narrowed it down quite a bit (and submitted it to Apple as FB9112835).

> What’s going on is that the IOAccelerator framework has some sort of massive leak in it, where it’s using up 35GB of ram, 25 of which is going to swap (which is why you’re seeing kernel_task flake out).

> On intel, the same image only uses 1480K from IOAccelerator.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#72

Post by dannyw »

cerved wrote: post #66
DenverCode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just purchased my first Mac after using Linux for most of my adult life. How big of a concern is this? I am seeing mixed reports when looking around - should I be questioning my purchase if I was expecting my M1 Air to last a few years?

AFAIK SSDs are generally replaceable, even in MacBooks. If you can replace it, I wouldn't worry too much

They're not replaceable in macbooks anymore.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#73

Post by notrandom »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #70
hn3333 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be very bad if OS memory usage did not return to flat no?

Depends on what you mean, there is no real reason to blank memory just because a program is exited.

A program should not hold memory anymore when it is no longer running. If it did, that would be an OS memory leak.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#74

Post by [deleted] »

notrandom wrote: post #73
boomboomsubban wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you mean, there is no real reason to blank memory just because a program is exited.

A program should not hold memory anymore when it is no longer running. If it did, that would be an OS memory leak.

[deleted]

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#75

Post by hutzlibu »

hn3333 wrote: post #52
techrat wrote: post #8

Even 360MB seemed a bit high to me so I had to open it up in a few apps to get some perspective. Ristretto: 48.8MB. EOG: 51.3MB. ImageMagick: 169MB. Firefox: 305.1MB. Vivaldi: 185.2MB. Edge: 196.5MB. GIMP: 244.8MB. OS memory usage remained relatively flat once app exited. xUbuntu 20.04.

It would be very bad if OS memory usage did not return to flat no?

It sometimes feel like it is a bonus today, if apps bother to clean up their memory at runtime, so maybe that's why parent poster thought it is a good and special thing, that the OS free's the memory of an ended processes.

Btw. many people don't seem to know, that also in languages with a garbage collector like Javascript, you can create awesome memory leaks. And I would bet, most websites actually do: it only works, like it works, because websites are closed regulary. And because RAM is every increasing. But browse with a older smartphone and you hit the RAM limit very quickly.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#76

Post by nix23 »

techrat wrote: post #8

Even 360MB seemed a bit high to me so I had to open it up in a few apps to get some perspective. Ristretto: 48.8MB. EOG: 51.3MB. ImageMagick: 169MB. Firefox: 305.1MB. Vivaldi: 185.2MB. Edge: 196.5MB. GIMP: 244.8MB. OS memory usage remained relatively flat once app exited. xUbuntu 20.04.

have 114MB on FreeBSD with MPV

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#77

Post by nix23 »

dannyw wrote: post #72
cerved wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK SSDs are generally replaceable, even in MacBooks. If you can replace it, I wouldn't worry too much

They're not replaceable in macbooks anymore.

Well he meant replaceable with a soldering iron ;)

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#78

Post by simondotau »

notrandom wrote: post #73
boomboomsubban wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you mean, there is no real reason to blank memory just because a program is exited.

A program should not hold memory anymore when it is no longer running. If it did, that would be an OS memory leak.

A process which doesn't exist cannot hold memory. But the OS can certainly chose to defer the erasure as long as there's no better use for that memory. This is often done to speed up the performance of processes which are frequently quit/stopped and reopened/started.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#79

Post by bipson »

jusssi wrote: post #28
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said, mixed reports ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26244093 ) and not much followup since then. The most common worst-case numbers from that thread, if sustained, would indicate a 4-5 year maximum lifetime. If this actually turns out to be a widespread problem and Apple doesn't address it in a timely update you may see a class-action lawsuit and/or Apple warranty repair service in a few years.

Wouldn't 4 to 5 years of full-day usage be just fine for worst case life expectancy for a laptop? I've had one that gave up on 3 years, a couple months after warranty ended (that seemed to be quite common for that brand at the time).

For Apple Laptops, more like 7-8, at least in the old days.

Typically you would only replace them when they (gradually) became annoyingly slow for daily use.

Agreed, I had to upgrade all of of my PowerBooks/MacBooks at some point with RAM and larger HDDs/SSDs.

And my last Apple Laptop is from 2012 and I learned that Apple now drops support by the OS considerably earlier than in the old days (i.e. unecesarily early, most 8-10 year old MacBooks would be perfectly fine for daily use, but now unsafe) - at least that was my impression.

And installing Linux on them is always a mixed bag (fans, trackpad, etc.), even though it sure is better with Intel Macs.

Re: Animated GIF uses over 35GB RAM in Acorn on M1 Mac, likely due to memory leak

#80

Post by konschubert »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #15
DenverCode wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just purchased my first Mac after using Linux for most of my adult life. How big of a concern is this? I am seeing mixed reports when looking around - should I be questioning my purchase if I was expecting my M1 Air to last a few years?

As you said, mixed reports ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26244093 ) and not much followup since then. The most common worst-case numbers from that thread, if sustained, would indicate a 4-5 year maximum lifetime. If this actually turns out to be a widespread problem and Apple doesn't address it in a timely update you may see a class-action lawsuit and/or Apple warranty repair service in a few years.

Like with the butterfly keyboard?

The one which they called a "pig" internally where "lipstick won't fix it", but which they kept selling for years?

That totally broke my trust that Apple will address quality issues.

https://www.ped30.com/2021/03/23/apple-butterfly-lipstick-pi...

Post reply on HN