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by cromka 21 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.
But is it FF that is taking all the RAM? If you restart it, how long until it fills again?
You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.
>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.

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-...

> Combined with systemd-oomd

That's my whole point: on Linux a process gets killed to prevent a system lock up if you're about to run out of memory or swap. That never happens on macOS, as long as you have some SSD left, period.

That’s not what I want (rogue program swapping until disk full), nor do I think most people want. Current zswap+oomd behavior is the best choice imho.
> (rogue program swapping until disk full)

OMG why do you keep on insisting on this? The point is you can run as many apps in the background and at no point will they get OOM-ed. This isn't about a rougue app, this is actually a very obscure reason to run out of memory! I get OOMed weekly on Asahi with 16GB only because my Brave/Chromium session grows too big. THIS NEVER HAPPENS ON MACOS.

> Current zswap+oomd behavior is the best choice imho

This isn't up for debate, Linux memory management is less advanced. How about you actually read up on the advantages of how macOS handles the memory and stop the speculation OK?

EOT here.

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.)
Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.
Interesting. I'm now working on some admin scripts and will add this to the list.