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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

#141

Post by zibzab »

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).

Enterprise Thinkpads easily last 10+ years. Although you will need to change the battery at some point.

I think my current work laptop is 6-7 years old. My backup laptop is 11 years old.

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

#142

Post by BoorishBears »

jiofih wrote: post #97
BoorishBears wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was nowhere nearly as interesting as if a specially crafted gif somehow triggered a memory leak in a driver when rendered. The title doesn't make it clear individually opening 730 frames in an the editor is the userspace action exposing an underlying system bug

Where do you see anything about individually opening 730 frames, and why would it be unsurprising for that tiny load to cause a bug? Have you heard of video editors? The same machine can edit four 4K@60fps streams.

Thanks for making my point, the program is indeed opening individual frames.

And what are you on about after that? No one said it's unsurprising for that to cause a bug. It's saying that the gif is not cause here, an editor is coming across a framework call that's blowing up

Call it an editor bug, or a framework bug, it's not an image using the memory, it's the editor

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

#143

Post by rob74 »

ulzeraj wrote: post #106

Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.

Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another architecture (which is also not a first, this now being their fourth architecture, after 680x0, PowerPC and x86). In the desktop/notebook market, Wintel and Apple are firmly entrenched, with only ChromeOS and Linux challenging them - plus a few less significant OSes (FreeBSD, ReactOS anyone?). For mobile devices, we had a bit of a "Cambrian explosion", unfortunately followed by a very quick extinction, which left us with another duopoly. Here also there are free alternatives which however have very marginal market share.

As for actual CPU architectures, there are only two that really matter at the moment: x86/AMD64 and ARM. It's of course very cool that ARM has proved itself flexible enough to be used from (almost) the smallest embedded devices to supercomputers (not to mention Apple M1), but there's not that much diversity as there was in the 80s either...

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

#144

Post by varjag »

meibo wrote: post #135
ulzeraj wrote: post #106

Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.

Maybe, but this seems to be a bug with Apple's IO toolkit on x86, so it's unrelated(other than x86 support on macOS already falling apart, which is completely unexpected, considering the quality of the rest of the OS after recent releases).

This is a bug on M1.

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

#145

Post by BlueTemplar »

AFAIK GIFs for actual video content (rather than small animated (emot)icons) went obsolete in about 1995, when the first RealPlayer video plugin was released.

Can someone explain to me why people are still using them for that 26 years later, especially now that we have much better formats like webm, mp4, or SVG, and will hopefully have AV1 hardware-supported in a few years ?

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

#146

Post by Reason077 »

marcan_42 wrote: post #24
bangonkeyboard wrote: post #6

Could this be related to the earlier reports of excessive SSD wear on M1 Macs?

No. There is no way this has anything to do with that. That's an issue with the OS swapper algorithm, and it should be fixed in macOS 11.4 according to reports.

> "That's an issue with the OS swapper algorithm, and it should be fixed in macOS 11.4 according to reports."

I hope so! My MacBook Air has been running over 10 TB of writes per month. Considerably more than my old Intel MacBook Pro, which averaged 2.8 TB per month. Both 8GB machines.

It's enough that I'm worried it could start to see degraded performance after a couple of years or so. That already seemed to be happening on my Intel MacBook after only ~120 TB writes (256GB SSD).

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

#147

Post by slver »

rob74 wrote: post #143
ulzeraj wrote: post #106

Who else is excited that we are might revive the 80s Cambrian explosion of different system system and architectures? Back then there were so many options.

Hmmm... the chances for that are pretty slim I'm afraid. "Apple Silicon" is not a new system, it's just one of the large incumbents switching to another architecture (which is also not a first, this now being their fourth architecture, after 680x0, PowerPC and x86). In the desktop/notebook market, Wintel and Apple are firmly entrenched, with only ChromeOS and Linux challenging them - plus a few less significant OSes…

Apple’s arm has a partially different instruction set than other arm devices. So it’s not just arm, something to consider.

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

#148

Post by lillecarl »

simondotau wrote: post #83
jacquesm wrote: post #27

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 Most other smartphone brands: hold my beer

Agreed, I'm going to stay on android til Apple puts a USB-C port in the iPhone. Most of my colleagues use iPhones and they're supported way longer than our android counterparts(Samsung exclusively).

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

#149

Post by slver »

marcan_42 wrote: post #67
Gaelan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS Safari seems to render it with no performance issues. Interestingly, it can’t seem to decide whether the background is black or green—it’s different each time I load the gif.

Browsers and other players will generally be fine, as they render the image progressively. However, editors /processing tools which attempt to load it as a series of frames or a video will usually break, as memory consumption explodes, unless they have a smart disk buffer system to handle it. I wouldn't be surprised if some poorly implemented players were built on top of abstraction layers that end up flattening the…

And this kids, is why we have key and delta frames.

We should drop gif support.

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

#150

Post by slver »

imtringued wrote: post #127
hutzlibu wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome runs a separate process per origin so that adds up almost as fast as Atom
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