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by slopinthebag1 days ago |
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upvoteby cromka1 days ago|
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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.

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upvoteby Retr0id5 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby mixmastamyk1 days ago|
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You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.
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upvoteby cromka23 hours ago|
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>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://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment..., https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...). Zsawp itself is enabled by default in Asahi.

Zram and Zsawp are mutually exclusive on Linux. On macOS, both concepts coexist – except macOS is able to compress individual memory pages (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.

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upvoteby mixmastamyk15 hours ago|
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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-...

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upvoteby baq1 days ago|
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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.)
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upvoteby cromka22 hours ago|
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Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.
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upvoteby mixmastamyk15 hours ago|
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Interesting. I'm now working on some admin scripts and will add this to the list.
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upvoteby mixmastamyk1 days ago|
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Compared to what? Not really true, and hard on the swap drive. Penny-wise meet pound.
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upvoteby slopinthebag1 days ago|
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Well it's still kicking just fine years later, shrug
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