SFUMATO Memories Mac OS

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  • I am running Mac OS Catalina 10.15.6 with APFS formatted disk on an unsupported MAC using dosdude1 guide. My experience from windows is I had to make careful calculations on pagefile.sys and run into limits on swap and memory. Since I’m new to Mac, I wish to avoid any mistakes and learn how to manage things properly. This is the view of my disk.
  • This will purge your Mac's inactive memory - something you might want to do after closing a particularly intensive app or game. Some features are available via the free app but there is an in-app.
  1. Sfumato Memories Mac Os X

If you think your Mac might have a hardware issue, you can use Apple Diagnostics to help determine which hardware component might be at fault. Apple Diagnostics also suggests solutions and helps you contact Apple Support for assistance.

Prepare your Mac

  1. Shut down your Mac.
  2. Disconnect all external devices except keyboard, mouse, display, Ethernet connection (if applicable), and connection to AC power.
  3. Make sure that your Mac is on a hard, flat, stable surface with good ventilation.

Start Apple Diagnostics

Determine whether you're using a Mac with Apple silicon, then follow the appropriate steps:

Text tutorials for users of Embird software. Tutorials are available also as a free plug-in for Embird. Download Tutorial Plug-in. This makes sense, the dedicated AMD Radeon Pro 5500 GPU on my Macbook Pro has 4GB of its own dedicated GDDR6 memory (VRAM), so it makes sense that the integrated graphics system uses RAM when it needs to. Apple appears to have fixed the usage of RAM by the integrated graphics to to 1.5GB. Unfortunately this seemed to put lots of memory pressure on my system after a few days, to where I’d. The latest Mac OS is Big Sur 11.2.3, released Monday, March 8th, 2021. This is a security update and Apple recommends that all users on macOS 11 update to 11.2.3. Latest iOS Version.

Apple silicon

  1. Turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button as your Mac starts up.
  2. Release when you see the startup options window, which includes a gear icon labeled Options.
  3. Press Command (⌘)-D on your keyboard.

Intel processor

  1. Turn on your Mac, then immediately press and hold the D key on your keyboard as your Mac starts up.
  2. Release when you see a progress bar or you're asked to choose a language.

View the test results

Apple Diagnostics shows a progress bar while it's checking your Mac:

When testing is complete, Apple Diagnostics shows the results, including one or more reference codes. Learn about Apple Diagnostics reference codes.

To repeat the test, click “Run the test again” or press Command-R.

To restart your Mac, click Restart or press R.

To shut down, click Shut Down or press S.

To get information about your service and support options, make sure that your Mac is connected to the internet, then click ”Get started” or press Command-G. Your Mac will restart to a webpage with more information. When you're done, choose Restart or Shut Down from the Apple menu.

Learn more

On an Intel-based Mac, if you can't start Apple Diagnostics with the D key, try these solutions:

  • Press and hold Option-D at startup to use Apple Diagnostics over the internet.
  • Make sure that your Mac isn't using a firmware password.

I just got myself a Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM.

So imagine my surprise when after a few days of running it, I looked at my memory in activity monitor and noticed that I was running with almost 14GGB of swap ?!?!? (It eventually ballooned to 32-35 GB of disk at one point)

Memories

This had been a recurring theme on my old machine with 16GB of Memory. The swap would increase up to 16GB sometimes, as much at 19-20GB+ and I couldn’t understand why. I just assumed that when I got more memory the problem would go away.

So after asking around on twitter, I started doing some research on possibly turning off my swap file. This may seem drastic, but many years ago when I was still a Windows user, I’d managed to do the same thing without much ill effect, so I figured … why not?

The instructions and a detailed explanation of what you’re doing are here. But the long and short of it is that you need to boot into recovery mode and then run the command

sudo nvram boot-args='vm_compressor=2'

When you boot back into MacOS, you can check that you are running in this mode by running this command

$ sysctl -a vm.compressor_mode

to which you should see this in response
vm.compressor_mode: 2

At first I was very nervous about running out of memory, but then I noticed something interesting. MacOS was still using swap!!!!

I was bummed, I thought I’d gotten it wrong somehow ?, but I hate rebooting my machine so I left things alone and continued to monitor memory/swap usage.That’s when I realized something interesting … My swap file usage wasn’t disabled, it was just now extremely conservative. I’ve been using this for almost a month now and the most swap I’ve ever seen it use is 300MB.

This is my current system swap usage

Amazing right?!

Its exactly what I wanted, and I’ve run so far without any memory errors or problems. And that’s while I am also using Memory Clean 3, to help me occasionally reclaim memory. I’ve used Memory clean for years and just recently upgraded.

I must mention that I’m not doing anything particularly stressful like video editing, gaming. Just running a couple of docker containers and running some Rspec tests from time time time, so your mileage may vary. If you do turn on conservative swap file usage on MacOS please report back or tweet at me to let me know how it goes!

Update: 10/23/20
I found that enabling “Automatic Graphics switching” in the Energy Saver section of System preference made the system use up more RAM.

This makes sense, the dedicated AMD Radeon Pro 5500 GPU on my Macbook Pro has 4GB of its own dedicated GDDR6 memory (VRAM), so it makes sense that the integrated graphics system uses RAM when it needs to.

Apple appears to have fixed the usage of RAM by the integrated graphics to to 1.5GB
Unfortunately this seemed to put lots of memory pressure on my system after a few days, to where I’d see the occasional crash.

Sfumato Memories Mac Os X

So for now I have disabled this option, and my system seems more stable now as my Macbook Pro uses the GPU memory exclusively and doesn’t touch my RAM 🙂