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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Active Research
Forum: Mapping Cancer Markers Forum
Thread: Why does MCM use 500MB RAM on Mac but only 70MB on Windows? |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 9
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 265 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Hi all. I have numerous Windows10 and Win7 machines that run WCG 24x7 and each thread only uses 70-80MB of RAM. Yet on the Apple M1 Mini and M1 Macbook Air, each processor thread uses 500MB!
----------------------------------------Why is there such a massive difference? On a side note, is WCG or MCM tweaking the application to run better on the M1 Macs? Thanks for any help!  |
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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I don't know but do you have a Mac with x86 processor? How much memory does it use on those?
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 265 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I don't know but do you have a Mac with x86 processor? How much memory does it use on those? I forgot to add that...my Intel iMac from mid 2017 (with whatever BOINC version was available then) is running at 78MB RAM per thread. My Windows machines are all running Boinc 7.14.2 from 2018. So these are not old installs, but certainly not the latest and greatest. 7.14.3 is available as of this writing for Wintel and 7.14.5 for Mac x86. So that's a very, very subtle point release for the Wintel after 2+ years of running just fine. I wonder if the newer Boincs (on both platforms?) from 2019 or 2020 consume a lot more RAM than the slightly older ones. Anyone know? I know that I'm definitely NOT upgrading my Wintel machines to find out! The Wintels, like the M1 Macs, only have 8GB of RAM so I'm not going to start crunching at 50% just to have the latest Boinc software. |
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I think it's that piece of extra software on the Mac that needed for WCG/MCM to run on the M1 chip.
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 265 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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I think it's that piece of extra software on the Mac that needed for WCG/MCM to run on the M1 chip. Quite possibly. I don't know much about it. But I'm sure the Apple team was like "hey, we can put this translation layer in here and not tell anybody. The apps will use 7x the RAM so that will help spread the word that customers should plunk down outrageous prices for RAM upgrades at checkout. Oh, and even thought it's practically 2021, let's only allow 16GB of RAM on our M1 machines, because, um, well, no reason actually."  |
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Sgt.Joe
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 4, 2006 Post Count: 7846 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Quite possibly. I don't know much about it. But I'm sure the Apple team was like "hey, we can put this translation layer in here and not tell anybody. The apps will use 7x the RAM so that will help spread the word that customers should plunk down outrageous prices for RAM upgrades at checkout. Oh, and even thought it's practically 2021, let's only allow 16GB of RAM on our M1 machines, because, um, well, no reason actually." You may be being sarcastic, but you may be closer to the truth than you realize. Cheers
Sgt. Joe
*Minnesota Crunchers* |
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 265 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Isn't there anyone from the WCG team or MCM project that can answer my RAM question? This seems like a very straightforward question.
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jmenard
Cruncher USA Joined: Jul 18, 2020 Post Count: 9 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Pretty sure it is the emulation layer since both my iMac and Intel Mac Mini both are around 70. Hopefully the applications get ported to support native M1.
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🏳️🌈 ⚛️ 🔆 🚴🏼♂️ 🖥 ☮️ 🥋
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ericinboston
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 12, 2010 Post Count: 265 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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So the answer seems to be that "it" has not been ported to use the M1 chip yet. Who can let us know when "it" has been ported and thus use far less RAM?
----------------------------------------Thanks! |
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