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[Support] [Solved] M3 has swap disabled out of the box (rblind.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/macos

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I got a new Mac with an M3 SoC and ran fastfetch, add one does on a new computer. It listed swap as being disabled.

Activity Monitor shows 0 bytes in swap. top and htop show 0 of 0.

I got on a call with Apple Support and the best I could get out of them was that “new Macs don’t use swap,” which is absolutely not true. People are still reporting heavy swap usage on M3 Macs.

So… any ideas? It’s a very hard problem to research, since half the internet wants to disable swap to save their SSDs.

For what it’s worth, this machine has 16GB of RAM and I haven’t pushed it past that, but I’d expect it to behave quite catastrophically if I did.

I’m looking for any possible insights, really.

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[–] vzq 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What do you want exactly? Your post does not seem to contain an actual question besides “So… any ideas?”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

That’s fair, I’m just kind of flabbergasted.

I’d like to know:

Has anybody else experienced this?
Why would swap be disabled?
How do I enable it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Have you actually hit enough "Memory Pressure" (as it is called in Activity Monitor)? Macs dynamically allocate swap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Hm… So it could be “we haven’t needed to allocate swap space” more so than “we don’t know what swap is?”

I guess ill try hammering it hard to see what happens.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

One Prime95 later, you are absolutely correct.