Comment by Confiks
1 day ago
I'm not quite sure why all that swapping is necessary. I really does age your SSD quite fast considering the enormous memory bandwidth required. Gemma 4 31B at 4-bit quantization should only be around 19 GiB [1], not 28.4 GiB. I'm not feeding it images regularly, so I'm not sure how much memory it needs to get those into context, but I can't imagine it is more than 10 GiB.
The activity monitor does show all kinds of Electron apps active, on top of a presumably model-loaded Handy and a virtual machine for Claude Code, so I guess that's the real root cause for all the swapping. If your laptop starts trashing I can't imagine you have any use for those apps, which will grind to a halt.
[1] https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/gemma-4-31b-it-4bit
Yeah to be fair, I could've cleaned everything up but this was taken when I was doing other work on my laptop while the screenshot was taken.
Although slightly laggy, I was impressed by the fact that I was still able to work on other things and have a bunch of tabs open on my Brave browser.