Comment by cromka
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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.
zswap works well in my experience. Don't need both. Combined with systemd-oomd I haven't had a swapping or memory issue in many years. 16gb here with VMs and lots going on. This doc clears some things up:
https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...
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.)
Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.
Interesting. I'm now working on some admin scripts and will add this to the list.