Mac Mini M1Chip with 16gb memory with PL4?

DxO PhotoLab macOS topics
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In investigating the “excessive disk write” issue that has been in the news as late, I am seeing the very same thing happening on my M1 MacBook Air. It seems that with every image that is exported, 2 GB of RAM is used and just continues to grow with each export until RAM is used and disk swapping begins. It may be a possible issue with Rosetta and/or PL4 and/or Big Sur. Yesterday I only processed 11 D7500 Raw images and exported to 16 bit TIFF with Deep Prime. On the M!, PL4 consumed 9.5 GB of RAM (2/3 virtual). Because of the speed off RAM and SSD and tight coupling, no slow downs were noticed. So, I wanted to see if it was PL4 endemic so I ran the same 11 images with PL4 on my iMac with Mojave (Deep Prime was excruciatingly slow) and after the first image, PL4 only used 2.3 GB of RAM and stayed there. Now perhaps it did request more RAM, but if it did, it properly was returned to the system.

What is also interesting, after processing the first image on my M1, I saw an identical size increase, except on the M1 it just continued to grow. So, perhaps
the Rosetta translator is not relinquishing the RAM even though PL4 requests it? I would think there should be some basic error checking in PL4 to insure it was returned to system (Dynamic Memory Allocation 101) and fault if it didn’t?

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I’ve not had any findings regarding excessive RAM usage on my Apple Silicon MBA. I was not looking for it either. All things GUI seem to work at least as smooth as on my 8core Intel iMac.

Note that RAM is shared with the GPU, this can raise PL’s consumption, if reported together.

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I have the same issue & have stopped using my mini M1 because of this. Had to revert to a windows machine.

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What was the barrier to quitting and re-opening Photolab between each folder edit and export? I.e. doing one set of images and then another. Do you process very large sets Jeff?

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I’ve been researching PCs for this precise reason. I topped out all the upgrades on my new M1 macmini and it’s such a bummer.

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I do. It’s very frustrating when trying to process a large number of images in PL5 with Deep Prime. I’ve just reduced the number of images it can simultaneously process to 4 and closed down everything else. I won’t even open a browser window. If there is a way to sort this problem of running out of application RAM, I’d love to hear it.

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