Comment by ricardobeat
18 days ago
> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news
Not when one of those decides to wreck havoc - spotlight indexing issues slowly eating away your disk space, icloud sync spinning over and over and hanging any app that tries to read your Documents folder, Photos sync pegging all cores at 100%… it feels like things might be getting a little out of hand. How can anyone model/predict system behaviour with so many moving parts?
My pet peeve with the modern macOS architecture & its 600 coordinating processes & Grand Central Dispatch work queues is debugability.
Fifteen years ago, if an application started spinning or mail stopped coming in, you could open up Console.app and have reasonable confidence the app in question would have logged an easy to tag error diagnostic. This was how the plague of mysterious DNS resolution issues got tied to the half-baked discoveryd so quickly.
Now, those 600 processes and 2000 threads are blasting thousands of log entries per second, with dozens of errors happening in unrecognizable daemons doing thrice-delegated work.
> Now, those 600 processes and 2000 threads are blasting thousands of log entries per second, with dozens of errors happening in unrecognizable daemons doing thrice-delegated work.
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to grab Craig Federighi by the scruff and rub his nose in it. Every event that’s scrolling by here, an engineer thought was a bad enough scenario to log it at Error level. There should be zero of these on a standard customer install. How many of these are legitimate bugs? Do they even know? (Hahaha, of course they don’t.)
Something about the invisibility of background daemons makes them like flypaper for really stupid, face-palm level bugs. Because approximately zero customers look at the console errors and the crash files, they’re just sort of invisible and tolerated. Nobody seems to give a damn at Apple any more.
Are you sure they don’t get sent to Apple as part of some telemetry / diagnostics implementation?
2 replies →
>with dozens of errors happening in unrecognizable daemons doing thrice-delegated work.
It seems like a perfect example of Jevons paradox (or andy/bill law): unified logging makes logging rich and cheap and free, but that causes everyone to throw it everywhere willy nilly. It's so noisy in there that I'm not sure who the logs are for anymore, it's useless for the user of the computer and even as a developer it seems impossible to debug things just by passively watching logs unless you already know the precise filter predicate.
In fact they must realize it's hopeless because the new Console doesn't even give you a mechanism to read past logs (I have to download eclecticlight's Ulbow for that).
It's slowly approaching what SRE has been dealing with for distributed systems... You just have to accept things won't be fully understood and whip out your statistical tooling, it's ok. And if they get the engineering right, you might still keep your low latency corner where only an understandable set of things are allowed.
If open source projects like Slackware Linux can keep it stable on zero budget with a zoo of components since before we knew what SRE was, then Apple can afford to have operating system specialists who know the whole system. It’s like they gave up and welded the jukebox closed because it was making enough money.
Slackware Linux is way less complicated than MacOS. It runs far fewer, and much simpler, components and much less functionality in a default install. Like any Linux, there are myriad problems that can arise as users begin customizing the system, but until then, all those potential bugs remain deceptively hidden below the surface. And Slackware also has no constantly moving hardware team to keep track against and no hard timelines to hit for releases.
and if it paid off, that would almost be acceptable! But no. After spotlight has indexed my /Applications folder, when I hit command-spacebar and type "preview.app", it takes ~4 seconds on my M4 laptop to search the sqlite database for it and return that entry.
grumble
On pre-Tahoe macOS there is the “Applications” view (accessible e.g. from the dock). Since the only thing I would use Spotlight for is searching through applications to start, I changed the Cmd+Space keybind to launch the Applications view. The search is instant.
Spotlight, aside from failing to find applications also pollutes the search results with random files it found on the filesystem, some shortcuts to search the web and whatnot. Also, at the start of me using a Mac it repeatedly got into the state of not displaying any results whatsoever. Fixing that each time required running some arcane commands in the terminal. Something that people associate with Linux, but ironically I think now Linux requires less of that than Mac.
But in Tahoe they removed the Applications view, so my solution is gone now.
All in all, with Apple destroying macOS in each release, crippling DTrace with SIP, Liquid Glass, poor performance monitoring compared to what I can see with tools like perf on Linux, or Intel VTune on Windows, Metal slowly becoming the only GPU programming option, I think I’m going to be switching back to Linux.
macOS profiling tools completely blow Linux’s perf out of the water. It’s not even close.
9 replies →
I have the same issue on my M4 Macbook Pro and I had it on my previous M2 Apple Mac Mini, on several macOS versions (pre-Tahoe). I suspect it has to do with the virtual filesystem layer, as I had used OneDrive for Mac and now Proton Drive. Whatever it is, it has been broken for years on several devices and OSes and I am pretty sure Apple doesn't care about it.
On my Intel mac searching with cmd+space for a file takes under a second. Maybe there is a problem on your end?
I’ve actually had worse problems as recently as last week: Apps stopped showing up completely in spotlight.
Only a system reinstall + manually deleting all index files fixed it. Meanwhile it was eating 20-30GB of disk space. There are tons of reports of this in the apple forums.
Even then, it feels a lot slower in MacOS 26 than it did before, and you often get the rug-pull effect of your results changing a millisecond before you press the enter key. I would pay good money to go back to Snow Leopard.
2 replies →
Absolutely there's a problem on my end, but how do I fix it! How did it get to that state in the first place? How do I make it not come back?
I may be a spotlight unicorn, but I’ve never seen this behavior people complain about. Spotlight has always been instant for me, since its introduction and I’ve never seen a regression.
It is completely useless on network mounts, however, where I resort to find/grep/rg
I've never had this issue. M1 Max. But I also disable some of the Spotlight indexes. Cmmd+Space has no files for me, when I know I am searching for a file I use Finder search instead.
TIL there is a search bar triggered by CMD+Space. After 15 long years.
Too late. Apple has destroyed it.
I just got my first ARM Mac to replace my work Win machine (what has MS done to Windows!?!? :'()
Used to be I could type "display" and Id get right to display settings in settings. Now it shows thousands of useless links to who knows what. Instead I have to type "settings" and then, within settings, type "display"
Still better than the Windows shit show.
Honestly, a well setup Linux machine has better user experience than anything on the market today.
14 replies →
Despite what the sibling comment says, my anecdata is that cmd+space works perfectly fine.
People are really unable to differentiate “I am having issues” and “things are universally or even widely broken”
2 replies →
It feels like the 2000s era of “Mac software is better but you have to tolerate their hardware to enjoy it” has inverted in the last 5 years. Incredible hardware down to in-house silicon, but software that would have given Steve Jobs a stroke.
Firstly performance issues like wtf is going on with search. Then there seems to be a need to constantly futz with stable established apps UXes every annual OS update for the sake of change. Moving buttons, adding clicks to workflows, etc.
My most recent enraging find was the date picker in the reminders app. When editting a reminder, there is an up/down arrow interface to the side of the date, but if you click them they change the MONTH. Who decided that makes any sense. In what world is bumping a reminder by a month the most common change? It’s actually worse than useless, its actively net negative.
for me it’s iMessage, it gets out of sync way too often and then it eats the CPU away
Pretty heavy iMessage user here, but I can't say I experience any issues, and that's probably why your issue is not getting fixed - ie. nobody at Apple is able to reproduce it. Maybe you should gather some info about it and see if you can send a bug report?
It happens more often when switching devices, particularly if it’s a less than regularly used device like an iPad. Happens with my travel MacBook. Takes messages a solid day to catch up.
The most I’ve heard back from a reproducible bug report was ”cool, it shouldn’t do that”. The response came on the dev forums, the actual bug has never been acknowledged or fixed. Multiple times. Why bother?
1 reply →
What I've found is if I open a picture in iMessage it tends to trigger the CPU hungry behavior. I notice it after a while as my laptop starts getting hot and battery draining much faster than expected. I hard quite iMessage, reopen it, and all is fine.
fair point, I should — one classic symptom I experience is the emoji picker will make it crash, not load quickly, and if it finishes loading they all appear as empty placeholders (maybe because I have way too many stickers and iCloud sync is tripping? idk)
I wonder if that explains my intermittent keyboard lockups on MacOS? The keyboard just failing to work for a few minutes. The keyboard, a logitec one with a dongle, never has problems under windows or linux. M1 mac mini, not upgraded to Tahoe yet.
Sounds like typical Windows experience