The unfortunate part is, when it freezes, it does the beachball for a full minute before I successfully execute a “switch to activity monitor / s click topmost process / force quit / confirm” sequence. Each step takes around 45 seconds to complete. I assume Apple QA never tested the extreme edges of workloads.
One poor guy on Twitter is already up to 18% of his SSD lifetime, in the first three months of having an M1. We had a heart to heart about how silly it was that the drive will die within a year, that Apple better replace it under warranty, and so on. But it’s a coin toss whether he’ll just have to eat the cost and buy a new one: https://twitter.com/_wli/status/1364934834229977090?s=21
> I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.
When I'm in development mode with all cylinders firing, I have a single Eclipse window in CDT perspective, a couple of terminal tabs, Zeal (or Dash) for documentation and a couple of firefox tabs for documentation not available in Zeal.
Music is either supplied by a single YouTube tab or Spotify, and that's it.
The most unfortunate component is CPU in my case. I try to ooze every single bit of performance from it while running the application. Memory controller comes the second due to transfer operations but, I neither max out the RAM or cause system to do heavy swapping.
I'm always kind of conscious about the hardware resources of the system and minimize my resource usage habitually, without killing productivity.
The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
Unfortunately, and somewhat sadly, and melanchololy, I must report that I've been at OS version 11.2.3 (the latest) and run almost zero Rosetta apps: KeepassX, Beyond Compare, and Optimal Layout; of those, Optimal Layout has read 100GB, which is almost nothing.
In comparison, my kernel_task process is at 43TB bytes written, and WindowServer is at 8TB read.
So, as with cancer, there are multiple contributing factors, and hopefully Apple will ship an update to fix it... someday.
> around 35 macvim windows
You do you, but I'd wager you could probably trim some of that low hanging fat
How many eyes do you have?
Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.