Swap Memory Consumption

[AlexandrosKyriakakis]

Chip: Apple M1 Pro
Memory: 32 GB
macOS: 13.4 (22F66)
Orbstack Version: 0.12.0 (1771)

Hello, Im using orbstack the last 2 months. It's really fast and handy. 💯
Im lately experiencing some issues with swap memory consumption.
I used to have it in the background for around a week and occasionally using it to run my containers.
Realised today that it was using close to 8G of swap.

Do you have any known issue regarding swap memory?

[kdrag0n]

Are you talking about swap in the VM or on macOS?

If it's in the VM then there's nothing to worry about (memory management working as designed), although you should consider increasing the memory limit in OrbStack settings to improve performance. It means that you're running close to the memory limit.

[kdrag0n]

Please share a screenshot of Activity Monitor with all the exact process names, sorted by memory.

If the process using memory is "Virtual Machine Service", then you may want to consider decreasing the memory limit in OrbStack settings.

After you use memory in your containers, it can't be released without restarting OrbStack due to a macOS bug that we're still waiting for Apple to fix. https://docs.orbstack.dev/efficiency#dynamic-memory

If you're concerned that something you're running is using more memory than expected, you can check memory usage with this command:

docker run -it --rm --pid host alpine sh -c 'apk install htop && htop'

[AlexandrosKyriakakis]

Ok thanks for the context! I think this is what happened.

I loaded a high memory usage project with many containers. Then deleted them but the memory stayed allocated under the "Virtual Machine Service". After I restarted OrbStack it went back to normal. Let me reproduce the issue and come back with some screenshots...

So I'll keep in mind that when I load a huge project, then an OrbStack restart is useful 🙇🏼

Wondering why I did not have such issues with docker engine running the same project 🤔
(though docker engine was much slower in general than OrbStack)

[AlexandrosKyriakakis]

Hmm... It keeps happening. I have no container in use but memory keeps allocated.

I guess a day 1 solution (until apple fixes the bug) could be a restart button in orbstack menu bar?

Screen.Recording.2023-07-12.at.6.32.09.PM.mov

[kdrag0n]

If it's not causing noticeable slowdowns for you (and I don't think it should given how much memory you have), then I would highly recommend leaving it alone. macOS' memory management is quite good and it compresses memory transparently.

No plans to add a restart button as it's likely to be confusing in some cases and usually not needed. You can make an alias for orb shutdown; orb for a faster way to restart OrbStack from the command line. Also consider decreasing the memory limit in Settings.

[AlexandrosKyriakakis]

Oh right. I'll add an alias! Thanks a lot for your response!
You've done awesome work 💯 !