How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?

Post by saagarjha » Sun, May 03, 2026, 10:20 AM UTC

p_ing wrote: post #55

sgt wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing there are thousands running those apps (incl. Freeform) without memory leaks, it could be something else at play here.

It's quite clearly a bug and likely not one easy to diagnose or reproduce given the length of time the bug has remained in macOS. Or a fix would be a drastic breaking change. Or Apple doesn't really care, though I doubt that's the case.

Post by rbanffy » Sun, May 03, 2026, 11:35 AM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #32

fouc wrote: post #7

>Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used, I stepped down to 3 cores and 6 GB, to discover that memory usage fell to 3.9 GB and everything worked well. With just 2 cores and 4 GB of memory only 3.1 GB of that was used, and the VM continued to handle those lightweight tasks normally. Good reminder that there's a certain amount of memory tied up wit…

As a general rule, also the amount of physical memory installed in a computer should be proportional with the number of hardware threads provided by its CPU. Besides the fact that the operating system may allocate some memory for each thread, when you launch a multi-threaded application that is able to use all available threads, for instance the compilation of a big software project, it frequently will allocate some…

Post by zamadatix » Sun, May 03, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

schrodinger wrote: post #69

wutwutwat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some overhead per-core, you're right, but imo this reduction in usage is likely from how the kernel allocates available memory, which is being reduced as well. The kernel will keep read caches around longer with more memory, it'll prefer to compress memory instead of swap to disk if it has more, it'll purge/cleanup reclaimable memory less often with more memory, etc. It even scales its internal buffer sizes…

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Post by e40 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

highpost wrote: post #68

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Apple's container CLI. I moved a project of mine from colima+docker to it relatively easily, a couple of weekends ago. https://github.com/apple/container

Here's an example of how to build a simple Alpine Linux container using Apple's containerization CLI. It also demonstrates how to connect to the container through Tailscale SSH using a Tailscale auth key stored in Apple Keychain: https://github.com/highpost/tailscale-macos-container

Post by sharts » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

troad wrote: post #91

sagarm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this project aim for docker cli and api compatibility? Searching for Docker on that page yields no results. Though in their example, they do show an example of a Dockerfile referencing docker.io without shame. Typical Apple behavior, I guess, but grating to see in a OSS tool.

This is a weird take, imho. Should they feel shame for using Dockerfiles in their OCI-standard-compliant tool? Would you be happier if they introduced subtly incompatible Applefiles? Why are they obliged to emulate the Docker CLI? This limits them to just shadowing someone else's product. Just use Docker if you want their CLI/API, it uses the same virtualization framework under the hood on Macs.