[ki_]

I have an M2 for my work. MacOS still gives me random lag spikes sometimes. But it's probably because the OS is bad and not the hardware. This is never an issue on win/linux. idk. im not a fan. but.. im just saying.. if the hardware is so superior, why does it feel so inferior? Like.. my $500 linux laptop feels smoother and faster (GUI wise)

[crimsontech]

I’ve had a few corporate MacBooks sent to me by clients for security testing and they always seem much slower than my own. It’s normally down to security tooling they install on them.

[charrondev]

This 100%.

My personal MacBook Pro (m1 pro) feels (and benchmarks) far faster than my work M1 Max which has cylance and Jamf on it.

Recently it has had a cpu core dedicated to `find / -iname log4j-core*` which has a very unreasonable impact on everything else on the machine.

[jeroenhd]

I feel a little conflicted about this.

On the one hand, a lot of security software is poorly written, eats resources like it's Chrome, and introduces all kinds of microstutters through (exclusive) locks all over the place.

On the other hand, many operating systems don't provide a (reliable) API to design decent security software against. Log collection is all over the place, even on Windows, which traditionally had Event Log as a well concentrated logging destination. There's no way to write good security software for an operating system that's written without security software in mind.

If I were handling important secrets, I wouldn't want a fleet of machines out there with just the basic antivirus that came preinstalled with the OS (if it came with one at all). On the other hand, so many pieces of "enterprise" security management are absolutely terrible, and require one (or more) full-time employee(s) to constantly configure them, communicate with users, and solve problems, just to keep software in check.

I think both operating systems and security management software need to listen to each other, and change. Operating systems need to be written with security stuff in mind, and security software needs to focus on a good user experience rather collecting than shiny buzzwords to sell to management.

[emmet]

That's exactly what it is. Even an olympic sprinter is slow with two broken legs.

[JohnBooty]

Yeah. At my previous job we had all kinds of JAMF management software and Crowdstrike (??) and it was a massive performance killer.

Particularly, it seemed to be configured to scan every file on disk access, which was a performance nightmare for things like that involved "accessing lots of files" like Git on our large repo. Spotlight indexing seemed to cause some pretty big random lag spikes as well.

[HumanOstrich]

Do you work for a big corporation? They tend to install a ton of spyware on work machines they issue. Lots of flakey security and monitoring software with overlapping functionality.

[mschuster91]

> I have an M2 for my work. MacOS still gives me random lag spikes sometimes.

You're most likely running low on RAM and the machine is swapping. Check in Activity Monitor what's going on.

[JohnBooty]

What security and management crap does your workplace mandate/preinstall, if any?

My personal Macs with none of that crap perform extremely well, but that third-party security crap can be a massive killer.

[al_borland]

Is this a work laptop at a large corporation? I’ve found things my company installs can bring any system to its knees. The M1 was the first time my fans didn’t kick on randomly due to some background process, which has been nice. Windows or macOS, they found ways to screw up both. I’m sure they’d do it to Linux too, if it was supported.

[colingoodman]

I don't experience any such lag spikes even when I have a lot running. Are you using a Macbook Air?

[sdflhasjd]

I get this on my Mac Studio when I do anything CPU-intensive, the UI becomes jittery. macOS on M CPUs seems to be particularly sensitive to this because I can push a Ryzen much harder and not notice anything in Windows.

[Angostura]

When you say lag spikes what kind of thing are you talking about? I have an M1 iMac I run pretty’s hard and I’m not sure what kind of behaviour you’re seeing.

Anything weird showing in Activity Monitor or Console?

[foobar1962]

If it refers to random beach balls for 30 seconds when accessing disk ether directly or through apps... yeah I get that. I found it disappointing, a flaw in an otherwise great machine (M1 Mac mini).

[steve_adams_86]

I used to hit this on an M1 with low RAM while absolutely assaulting it with a project that used docker compose to run far too many resources.

These days I can't seem to hit my M2 Max hard enough. Nothing slows it down. Just about anything will have lag spikes if you crank too much stuff through it, so I assume that (like me) you're experiencing this with devices running MacOS with around 8-16GB RAM, M1 processor at best?

[carlmr]

>Like.. my $500 linux laptop feels smoother and faster (GUI wise)

Which Linux do you use? We've had fast enough machines for fast and smooth GUI rendering for decades now. It's just that most software isn't optimized any farther than a few years back.

Linux tends to be quite good on resource consumption. I can still run smooth and fast Linux on my 15 year old laptop. I can't do the same with Windows.

[BirAdam]

IME, Intel’s Clear Linux is unbelievably good. Most people never give it a chance, but it runs great on core i3 from 2017 with just 8GB of RAM… and this is an OS that uses containers for almost everything. Just wonderful work by Intel’s team and contributors.

[rsynnott]

One thing to check: are you using iterm? iterm, by default (or at least this used to be the default; not sure if they fixed it) keeps indefinite scrollback history, in memory. It's perfectly possible for this to consume all your memory. It's worth checking memory usage in activity monitor, anyway.

That said, "terrible corporate spyware" would be my first guess here.

[BeFlatXIII]

How much RAM do you have and do you know how much swap is in use during the lag spikes?

[dimgl]

I have two M1 machines and haven't seen a single lag spike on both.

[solarkraft]

Same - I've used multiple ARM Macs and they just freeze up for seconds sometimes. At this point I'm pretty sure its related to their swapping behavior.

[alpaca128]

The OS really has zero hesitation to swap to sometimes insane amounts and by the time you feel it in the UI responsiveness you might already be swapping 10-20GB.

8GB is just too little for the base model. From what I've seen the OS alone will use 20-50% of that, and if I do anything productive with a couple applications and browser tabs I'm soon at 100% memory usage. Which can cause lags or short freezes when switching between applications. But on 16GB it's a very different experience, it gives decent breathing room.

I think Apple really shot themselves in the foot with this, anyone using even half the CPU's potential is guaranteed to have significantly degraded performance and a worse experience.

[crimbles]

Not an issue for me even on my bottom end M2 mini.