Comment by slopinthebag

1 day ago

MacBooks don't need as much ram - I have an m1 air with 8gb of ram and it's perfectly serviceable, I can even run IntelliJ on it...

I never run out of memory on macoOS on my M1 Air 16GB. Now that I use Asahi on it, I had plenty of OoM crashes.

macOS is really good at memory management, including the compression and offloading to the fast SSD.

  • Do you use Firefox? I have a theory that there's some kind of Firefox-aarch64-linux-specific memory leak but I haven't been able to track it down. I have a 16GB x86-64 Thinkpad and I rarely get OOM issues, whereas my 32GB M1 MBP running Asahi is always on the brink of OOM.

  • You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.

    • >You have a buggy program.

      As in memory leak? No.

      > Zswap has been available for quite a while.

      Zsawp is not Zram, which is a distant relative of the macOS on-the-fly compression I was talking about. Zram is buggy and still advised against regular use (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432) on the fly. Zram is a compressed RAM block device with a hard capacity limit.

      There is really no comparison here at this point. macOS is vastly superior in that regard.

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    • I'm yet to see a linux distro with memory configured correctly out of the box. (I haven't looked too hard, but the defaults are abysmal.)

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