Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro–and I’m not alone

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • AutoEq

    Automatic headphone equalization from frequency responses

    To clarify things, PipeWire is an audio daemon, completely unaffiliated with https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq which is a set of headphone impulse responses. It just so happens that the recommended way to apply these impulse responses on Linux is EasyEffects, which now depends on both PipeWire and GTK4. Nonetheless, PipeWire is not EasyEffects and not AutoEq, and "Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though" is untrue because EasyEffects is not PipeWire's official GUI, and doesn't even come up when I search `pipewire gui`.

    I haven't tested EasyEffects. With that in mind, PipeWire is buggy AF for the time being, and I've been working over the past week to clean things up (fixed a few bugs in plasmashell and pipewire so far, but I'm still learning and there's a great deal of bugs I haven't diagnosed and explained to the maintainers, it will probably take weeks longer for me to work through everything, and I'd very much prefer the program was written to handle race conditions and edge cases properly, instead of leaving users to discover bugs and trace the root cause through the labyrinthine IPC-heavy event-driven codebase after the fact).

  • Lunar

    Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external monitors

    I just ordered the M1 Max with 64GB RAM because I'm constantly getting the "Your system has run out of application memory." popup while working on Lunar[1] in Xcode.

    Every time this happens, Xcode uses about 4GB of RAM (probably because of the monolithic UI storyboard of Lunar) but it should still leave enough memory for my other non-memory hungry apps.

    But then I open Activity Monitor and I see WindowServer using ~80GB of memory [2]

    The only remedy is either `killall WindowServer` or a full reboot.

    I've been using an M1 MacBook Pro and Monterey since the first developer beta but this only became an issue in the last 2 months or so.

    [1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar

    [2] https://cln.sh/CfEL6u

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • neon-guide

    Makes ARM NEON documentation accessible (with examples)

    NEON can work pretty well and has been used in real time tasks on mobile for a long time. Example operations:

    https://github.com/thenifty/neon-guide/

  • cctools-port

    Apple cctools port for Linux and *BSD

    You can use alternative toolchains like like cctools-port[1]. See, for example, this article [2] on how to build Swift UI apps for iOS using Linux.

    [1] https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port

    [2] https://thi.im/posts/cross-compiling-for-ios-part-1-build-sw...

  • BlackHole

    BlackHole is a modern macOS audio loopback driver that allows applications to pass audio to other applications with zero additional latency.

    > Wanna record your desktop audio as part of a screencast?

    It doesn't have to be a screencast, it's kind of a convoluted process regardless of which operating system you're using [1]. If I'm not mistaken OBS is using the built-in virtual loopback devices available through pulseaudio, but MacOS does not include a virtual loopback device by default, hence requiring a third party one such as Blackhole or loopback.

    > ...and often involves shady stuff

    ...what shady stuff are we talking about here? Blackhole [2] is open source software. It's about as shady as any of the (several) linux audio systems.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopback

    [2] https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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