For decades now, we've had to deal with articles like this one. People who know just enough to sound credible mislead those who known even less into mutilating their systems in the name of "optimization". This genre is a menace.

Much harm has arisen out of the superstitious fear of 100% CPU use. Why wouldn't you want a compute bound task to use all available compute? It'll finish faster that way. We keep the system responsive with priorities and interactivity-aware thresholds, not by making a scary-looking but innocuous number go down in an ultimately counterproductive way.

The article's naive treatment of memory is also telling. The "Memory" column in the task manager is RSS. It counts shared memory multiple times, once for each process. You literally can't say the 5MB "adds up". It quite literally is not amenable to the arithmetic operation of addition in a way that produces a physically meaningful result. It is absolute nonsense, and when you make optimization decisions based on garbage input, you produce garbage output.

It's hard to blame Apple for locking down the OS core like this. People try to "optimize" Windows all the time by disabling load-bearing services that cost almost nothing just so "number go down" and they get that fuzzy feeling they've optimized their computer. Then the rest of the world has to deal with bug reports in which some API mysteriously doesn't work because the user broke his own system but blames you anyway.

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saagarjha 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The "Memory" column in the task manager is RSS. It counts shared memory multiple times, once for each process.

It’s “footprint” and no it does not do that

	▲	quotemstr 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps it did a while ago. Now, https://www.bazhenov.me/posts/activity-monitor-anatomy/ is a good read. Thanks. It's much better than RSS, although I'm at still not sure that I like the inclusion of private compressed memory. In any case, thanks for the correction.

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giantrobot 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of the ways both macOS and iOS get good battery life is burst-y CPU loads to return the CPU to idle as quickly as possible. They also both run background tasks like Spotlight on the e-cores whenever possible. So some process maxing out an e-core is using a lot less power than one maxing out a p-core. Background processes maxing out a core occasionally is not as much of a problem as a lot of people seem to assume.

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latchkey 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're not wrong. Let's hope that articles, like the OP's post, shed light on further optimizations that Apple is now fully in charge of making.

	▲	quotemstr 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I see nothing in the post that convinces me Apple ought to change a single thing.