@fribbledom macOS users tend to show off "I have 200 tabs with 8GB ram", and it's true; what is also true is that ARM Macs have very fast I/O, so all that "very efficient memory management" macOS users enjoy and talk about, is actually "a lot of very efficient and curated paging to the very fast NVME drive" :) (I'm "forced" to use an M1 mac @ work and I notice this every single day).
@fribbledom Hmm, just to add to the pile of data points:
I'm using Arc browser here (Chromium-based, packaged in a Swift shell). While the definition of "open tabs" is rather fuzzy in Arc, I'm sitting at 460 MB right now with about 5 active tabs open and 10 more cached for instant access.
Makes me wonder what Chrome really adds on top of the engine to be so clunky.
Actually, I kinda am. Of course it's not gonna be a problem with the third tab, but I can't remember the last time my browser needed less than 8GB of memory on its own. Apple Silicon may be efficient, but that's not gonna help with memory consumption.
@fribbledom It's literally never been a problem. (Laptop is a 2015 MacBook Pro with 16GB but my desktop did come with 8 GB and ran on that for 6 years before I upgraded the RAM). 12 tabs open in Safari RN including this one and 3 DeviantArt tabs, plus I've got Firefox and Signal running.
@fribbledom Well, I only ever experienced limitations when I tried to open the 501st tab in safari on my mobile apple devices (iPhone & iPad with less than 8GB of RAM). On my old macbook (with 16 GB of RAM) I didn’t encounter any limitations yet. So, I guess one needs to use chrome or so to come across the limitations you seem to image exist.
In conclusion, upon opening a third browser tab, we wonder how you came up thinking this could be a problem, while opening hundreds of more browser tabs.🤷♂️
@fribbledom I’ve never had a problem opening multiple tabs on my 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM. I’m not saying that more RAM is unnecessary, just that macOS is very optimised. Also this is being typed on my iPad Air M1 that has 8GB RAM too. This thing is absurdly fast
@fribbledom RAM just works differently on Apple Silicon Macs. I’ve never had an issue, any slowdown, or any beachballs when using any of my M1 or M2 Macs
@fribbledom It's actually pretty impressive what they have achieved. The system stays way more responsive than it has any right to when it runs out of memory. I don't exactly know what they are doing, but I think it's kind of something like zswap + regular swapping but with measures in place to not swap out parts of the UI (which they can do because they own the entire stack). It's not like Linux where it gets unusable for seconds or minutes the moment it starts swapping.
@fribbledom I don't know...mine has 32GB and it's more than enough for incredible amounts of operations. Also I have about 200+ tabs open in Safari under something like 20 groups and there's literally no slowdown. If I have to relaunch it, it takes about 1 or 2 seconds. It hasn't been an issue for years and years for me.
Also I get the same kind of response on my iPhone and iPad Pro.
@fribbledom When I check my browser task manager most sites do no use more than 100MB each. Dunno where your high memory consumption is coming from. Extensions maybe?
@fribbledom Jokes aside, never EVER had any problem on my intel macs on running multiple apps. Everything is very optimized. And that's the only things keeping me on a Mac after 2015...
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