My Mac has developed the issue of slowing down over time if not rebooted. Heavy GPU use accelerates the decay. It feels just like swapping to disk except it's not - swap usage always 0. I didn't have this issue before Tahoe.

▲ CamJN a minute ago | parent | next [-]

I was seeing a bug that was very similar to what you describe! I fixed it on my Mac by deleting the .CFUserTextEncoding file in my home directory.

▲ CharlesW an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This isn't happening for me, if by "over time" you mean "several weeks" of heavy GPU use without a reboot. Consider the possibility that the root cause is not macOS.

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LoganDark an hour ago | parent [-]

By "over time" I mean that if I run local LLMs or play graphics-intensive games (like No Man's Sky's native Mac port) I can start seeing up to half-second (or longer) delays in switching apps, starting videos and much more with less than 5 days of uptime. Heavy enough usage will reproduce it within a few hours.

If I avoid doing those things, it can last much longer.

I have the 128GB/8TB M4 Max and I'm not even coming close to using up all or even most of the unified memory. I suspect it may be related to some form of fragmentation, though I have no way to know how.

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CharlesW an hour ago | parent [-]

I believe you, just suggesting that the issue may not be quite as general. I have a 64GB Studio M1 Max, so the years of hardware/firmware differences between us may be relevant as well. Hope you find a solution!

	▲	LoganDark an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It didn't happen to me before the update, so I suspect it must be something about the update or how it interacts with the software on my system. Still, it's one of those issues I have no hope of seeing solved, because at this rate nobody doing development at Apple is actually going to leave a Mac running for days on end...

▲ jon128 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We may not be far off from finding LLM prompts embedded directly in software. Instead of savefile(data_thing), we might start seeing

  agentcall( claude, data_thing, "please save this file to the user's home directory" )

and the author of that code will pat him/herself on the back then form a habit of telling his/her friends "I am an engineer, I have built over 100 software programs spanning multiple continents".

I already see this behavior out of the tech support class that likes to participate in bureaucratic processes among gen z. The standards and expectations for what is colloquially "engineer", outside of bonafide engineering circles, has really fallen over the last two decades.

The attitude that replacing functions with calls to AI agents is like totally okay in software engineering will eventually seep in too.

	▲	LoganDark an hour ago \| parent [-]
		https://github.com/cofob/autogenlib

▲ plqbfbv an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I once worked in L1 support, and because we had to take calls @07:00 sharp (we were the only number a company of 40k people could call) and Windows updates were still a multi-hour endeavor, I stuck to rebooting daily (or shutdown+startup) all devices I use heavily, including MacOS.

Over the past 8 years that has basically solved every bug all my colleagues ran into with MacOS. At some point my boss wasn't getting calendar notifications anymore for a couple weeks, "did you try and reboot?" fixed it in 5m. He later mentioned he hadn't rebooted in 7 weeks.

I don't understand why people treat Apple devices like unbreakable analog AM radios, they're very complex computers like any Windows or Linux machines, with a huge state machine beneath it that is easier to reset daily/weekly than to keep working properly for months.

	▲	LoganDark an hour ago \| parent [-]
		My Intel Mac didn't need to be rebooted. I would leave it running for months with no issues. Apple devices genuinely used to be that stable. I get that you can't generally expect things to be that stable. But in my experience they used to be and now they're not! My M4 Max was probably that stable too until Tahoe, although I rarely left it running for more than a few weeks between updates.