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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

#81

Post by supermatt »

marcan_42 wrote: post #48
supermatt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link for info on this? If this is a real issue (which I still have my doubts about), Apple can’t just sweep it under the rug, after all.

It's a real issue affecting a small minority of users; I have one who has already gone through 20% of their SSD lifetime writes. Here's one of the worse ones back in February: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1361847686417190918?s=19 11.4 is in beta so not many people are using it, but at least one of the folks with the issue is running it and said it improved things. Apple were definitely made aware of it, hence…

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 alert on my machine earlier because i opened a typescript file in VLC. It was using 26GB of memory (and climbing) when i noticed it and killed it. I have an 8GB RAM machine. The machine remained fully responsive throughout. That simply wasnt possible before.

Its definitely swapping a lot, for sure, but don't you think that there is a possibility that this is by design, sacrificing disk writes (i am 50TBW and still ONLY 2% "used" on a 256GB drive since launch) to make app switching more responsive?

I guess we will see when you are able to diff the source, and you can shut me up once and for all :)

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

#82

Post by simondotau »

can16358p wrote: post #39
jusssi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

Obviously that depends on a number of factors, including whether you purchase early or late in the generational cycle, whether you spring for the extra memory, total hours of runtime, exposure to rough handling / mechanical stress, and of course blind luck.

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

#83

Post by simondotau »

jacquesm wrote: post #27
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?

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

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

#84

Post by ody4242 »

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.

I would expect that if you read data - the GIF image in this case - from the block device, it will stay in pagecache, until there is memory pressure.

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

#85

Post by bipson »

can16358p wrote: post #39
jusssi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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 possible to download older release than the newest. I did not expect that.

And I had to upgrade SSD and RAM 2 and 4 years after buying, it became unusable for work (granted, it was not spec'ed out originally).

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

#86

Post by kiwijamo »

Toutouxc wrote: post #50
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 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.

Just out of interest, is she still using the same HDD? I find that the performance of older MacBooks are pretty awful under recent version of Mac OS if the storage hardware is the older non-SSD drives. My old $work MacBook with a HDD was thankfully swapped out for a SSD version -- the difference was night and day. Though this SSD machine is starting to slow down noticeably with Big Sur...

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

#87

Post by Reason077 »

konschubert wrote: post #80
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.

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...

Yes, it sucked that it took so long to redesign it. The bad keyboards started appearing around 2016, and it wasn’t until 2019 that a redesign first appeared, on the new 16” MacBook Pro.

But Apple have always been good about free, no-questions-asked, out of warranty replacements for faulty/sticky butterfly keyboards. Not really sure what more you could reasonably want them to do.

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

#88

Post by nly »

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.

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

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

#89

Post by Elv13 »

simondotau wrote: post #78
notrandom wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A process which doesn't exist cannot hold memory

Not quite. Some leaks are across processes. If your process talk to a local daemon and cause it to hold memory then quitting the client process wont necessarily free it. In a similar way, some application are multi-process and keep some background process active even when you quit to "start faster next time" (of act as spywares). This includes some infamous things like Apple updater that came with iTunes on Windows. It's also possible to cause SHM enabled caches to leak quite easily. Finally, the kernel caches as much as it can (file system content, libraries, etc) in case it is reused. That caching can push "real process memory" into the swap.

So quitting a process does not always restore the total amount of available memory.

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

#90

Post by BoorishBears »

nieve wrote: post #54
BoorishBears wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would require *rendering* in a specific program This program is an image editor essentially opening 700 tabs, one for each frame. It's not a "bomb" when you intentionally blow it up...

Several programs including Firefox Nightly have been reported to blow up, so no it's not limited to a "specific program".

If you're actually following it proves exactly what I'm saying, the gif has nothing to do with it, Firefox isn't blowing up opening that gif, it's hitting whatever framework leak exists.

This is like saying "DOCX bluescreens Windows" (which implies something that could possibly be exploited in some pretty scary ways) when in reality Word just happens to make some syscall that bluescreens Windows no matter who calls it

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