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

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

#121
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 16GB is suddenly low? Until now most laptops sold everywhere, including high end models, where 16GB and below. 32/64 is a tiny niche (and special built to order option in most cases), even for video and music editing people. Sure, 32GB would be nice, but let's pretend this is some huge issue for but a small minority that runs several VMs simultaneously or such. Not to mention the M1 machines released thus far…

Justify it how you like but I consider 16GB too low for my use. 32GB is minimum in 2021, with all my hardware having 64GB

I have a 32gb overclocked hackintosh and my 8gb M1 Air blows it away in nearly everything.

I’m not sure exactly what the difference is but in terms of UX, x86 ram needs do not translate to Apple Silicon 1:1

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

#122
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't see how this can be classed as a bug by anyone other than apple. You have a single case of 10% lifetime usage (plus a 20% one you mention), along with thousands of reports of people with 2-5% - which you also stated was too high - based on your insistence of using TBW (which can vary by up to 10000x depending on the tech) instead of percentage used (supplied by the manufacturer). I had an out of memory…

Tangential aside: I wonder if the kernel was running the swapfest on the efficiency cores, and that's what let the system remain so responsive. See also: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...

Swapping isn't CPU-intensive, and Apple also implemented the memory compression as custom CPU instructions. Swapping is I/O intensive, and these machines have stupid fast SSDs which is why they can get away with it.

When you think of swapping as slow it's not because it eats CPU, it's because it blocks on I/O.

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

#123
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacBooks can easily exceed 10+ years rock solid. (Only battery may need a replacement)

Not anymore. Now Apple will drop MacOS support for their computers way earlier. I tried to update my barely used MacBook from 2012/2013 somewhere last year and learned that it was dropped quite some time ago - so if I would have kept it on the newest release (there were serious bugs, I was hesitant), I think it would have got around 8 years max, if memory serves me right. No security updates at all anymore, not possi…

MacBook Pros and Airs from 2012 are supported by Catalina, and that is still getting security releases. It does require 4GB of RAM though if you didn’t have that to start with.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see a CPU Renaissance like this. Back then we had tons of variety, 680x0, x86, Rx000, various lisp machines, Vector computers, VLIW and Multiflow, Sparc, VAX, early ARM, message passing machines, 1-bit multiprocessors, Hypercubes, WD CPUs, and later an explosion of interesting RISC architectures... It was really interesting and enjoyable era.

As someone who programmed at that time, it was also very hard to write even small production programs. Today I do things in a half-an-hour with Python that would have taken me days - maybe weeks! - to accomplish in 1978. Each little vendor had their own janky tooling. Compilers cost hundreds of 1970s dollars (until Borland's $49 Turbo Pascal, over $150 in today's money). Don't get me wrong. I was very unhappy when In…

I mostly agree with your overall argument, but the "mostly" qualification goes along with a small but important correction:

>The fact that ARM, an open-source architecture

ARM is in no way open, it's fully proprietary. Unlike x86 it is not vertically integrated and is available for anyone to license all the way to the architectural level, and that's huge. But said licenses certainly are not free either, nor Free.

There are promising actual open architectures, in particular OpenPOWER and RISC-V come to mind as interesting with a lot of solid work behind them. So that's one small remaining opening IMO, even if it's more work on the dev side I wouldn't mind having those stick around and get more competitive.

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a maximum memory size of 8G it's a bit anemic so you likely wouldn't get that much life out of it anyway, hope you got the 16G version. Apple is pretty good at the planned obsolescence game, so getting the larger memory would at least help stave that off for a bit. I'm skipping these for now, I run Linux on all my machines and it typically takes a while for the wrinkles to be ironed out, and x86 has much better…

> Apple is pretty good at the planned obsolescence game Nah, they suck at it. My GF is just finishing her bachelors thesis in the living room on my 2013 MBP with 4 GB RAM. First battery, updated all the way from Mavericks to Big Sur. Still supported, still useful and prettier than 80 % machines out there.

You're right. Macs have excellent build quality and are durable as hell. Planned obsolescence with Apple is seen more with iPhones. There was the recent story about Apple slowing down older iPhones via software updates [1]

[1]: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724]

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

#126
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling M1s with a decent amount of RAM would surely help too

Because 16GB is suddenly low? Until now most laptops sold everywhere, including high end models, where 16GB and below. 32/64 is a tiny niche (and special built to order option in most cases), even for video and music editing people. Sure, 32GB would be nice, but let's pretend this is some huge issue for but a small minority that runs several VMs simultaneously or such. Not to mention the M1 machines released thus far…

I find that the browsers eat all my memory. Have to exit them for data crunching.

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

#127
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I have 32GB of RAM and it sits unused most of the time. Right now I am at 4GB/32GB. It simply isn't a significant source of memory consumption. Open Atom and you can easily get to 500MB for a single application, which is completely wasteful. That browser can run dozens of apps in 4GB.

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

#128
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who programmed at that time, it was also very hard to write even small production programs. Today I do things in a half-an-hour with Python that would have taken me days - maybe weeks! - to accomplish in 1978. Each little vendor had their own janky tooling. Compilers cost hundreds of 1970s dollars (until Borland's $49 Turbo Pascal, over $150 in today's money). Don't get me wrong. I was very unhappy when In…

I mostly agree with your overall argument, but the "mostly" qualification goes along with a small but important correction: > The fact that ARM, an open-source architecture ARM is in no way open, it's fully proprietary. Unlike x86 it is not vertically integrated and is available for anyone to license all the way to the architectural level, and that's huge. But said licenses certainly are not free either, nor Free. Th…

SPARC is open and not only that Sun shared some actual cores that were used in production. I don’t know why Power gets mentioned but SPARC doesn’t.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 16GB is suddenly low? Until now most laptops sold everywhere, including high end models, where 16GB and below. 32/64 is a tiny niche (and special built to order option in most cases), even for video and music editing people. Sure, 32GB would be nice, but let's pretend this is some huge issue for but a small minority that runs several VMs simultaneously or such. Not to mention the M1 machines released thus far…

I find that the browsers eat all my memory. Have to exit them for data crunching.

I have hundreds of tabs in Firefox. Total memory usage is 4GB at worst.

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

#130
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But closing tab != closing app.

It should be equal when we are talking about webapps.

It would be fair for a browser to assume that if you’ve just visited one page that you might return soon, and so keep assets in cache for a little while.
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