Accordance memory pressure

[Michel Gilbert]

I got a new M1 machine (mini) a few weeks ago and I’ve been monitory the memory pressure. Accordance hasn’t used over half a GB so far. All of a sudden it is at 2.7 GB and all I have open in Accordance is BHS and a research tab for all texts of Ruth 1:21.. And since taking the screenshot, it has risen to 2.83 GB.

 

That's two of my eight GB used up or no apparent reason. Has anyone else seen this? Should I be concerned? Should I just restart Accordance and see if it ever happens again?

 

 

[dandennison]

I don't have an M[12] mac but on my Intel that number is the sum of Shared + Private memory. You can see the breakdown if you Cmd+I or press the i on the toolbar.

 

I'm doing a 1:1 Research over [All] of =Gen-Rev just for fun right now. Presently my Shared = 173MB, Private = 734MB, Real = 2.4GB and Virtual = 38.54GB. Virtual uses 38GB likely because the modules are opened using memory mapped IO, so it's really files but they are mapped to memory addresses for ease. This "memory" is not pinned to physical RAM chips.

 

While I have seen Shared+Private (the number you see in Activity Monitor's table) peak into 1-2GB, it's usually momentary while displaying the output of the research.

 

While I suspect there isn't an issue here, feel free to post more details about the breakdown in kinds of memory used and the behavior of the allocator when you close tabs or windows in Accordance. Does this cause other apps to grind on your machine?

[Michel Gilbert]

Thanks for explaining this. 

 

I don’t remember my system becoming sluggish.

 

I attached a screenshot of Accordance running right now, with BHS open (nothing else), reading 155.9 MB in the Memory column:

 

I do wonder about the 391 GB Virtual Memory Size.

 

Thanks again.

 

[dandennison]

That is Apple silicon doing its thing. Inside a 64-bit process virtual address space, where the OS decides to hang devices is up to the imagination of developers. These newer Macs place the GPU Carveout at 384GB of virtual address space.

 

This virtual allocation is very sparse of course. As a result, this is a mostly useless metric. It's kind of like house numbers on your street. My street uses 5 digits even though we don't have 100k homes on it. Why this is described as a "size" is largely for historical reasons when this kind of imaginative use of user address space was far more limited.