I’ve a ten core M1 Professional MacBook Professional with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage, on Ventura 13.0. It appears to endure from extreme SSD writes for no obvious purpose, a state of affairs that appears similar to what a number of customers described quickly after the M1 chips got here out, for instance right here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252532855

Smartctl report:

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment check consequence: PASSED

SMART/Well being Data (NVMe Log 0x02)
Crucial Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        34 Celsius
Obtainable Spare:                    100%
Obtainable Spare Threshold:          99%
Share Used:                    2%
Information Items Learn:                    266,856,852 [136 TB]
Information Items Written:                 132,865,271 [68.0 TB]
Host Learn Instructions:                 3,388,169,733
Host Write Instructions:                847,144,045
Controller Busy Time:               0
Energy Cycles:                       143
Energy On Hours:                     841
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   7
Media and Information Integrity Errors:    0
Error Data Log Entries:      0

Varied articles point out that the SMART reporting won’t be correct. So I additionally regarded issues up in Exercise monitor, which appears to match the SMART knowledge fairly properly in my case:

That is over a 11.5 hour interval, so virtually 4.5 GB written per hour, and the laptop computer spent no less than 2 hours idle in display screen saver mode throughout this time, with mild shopping, youtube and video calls within the others. I’ve an exterior monitor related. From what I learn, the kernel_task bytes written appears to be what the OS writes to swap. Regardless, that is 19.33 GB that I can’t account for. I’ve plenty of chrome tabs (30-40) open, however solely 4-5 that I usually swap between. I even have some messenger apps open and a few coding editors. There aren’t any noticeable slowdowns that may point out low reminiscence and Exercise Supervisor does not imply this may be the case both:

It is fascinating to me that the Swap Used subject right here doesn’t correspond in any respect to how a lot kernel_task has written. Some type of error in reporting, or simply plenty of issues getting deleted from swap and others written, whereas sustaining the rely across the 3.6 GB proven right here? It is round this worth on a regular basis after I verify.

All that is much like what individuals had been describing beforehand, earlier than a patch supposedly addressed this someday again in Massive Sur.

Whereas I am not noticing any slowdowns and every thing appears effective, this SSD utilization is so much greater than I’ve ever seen.

• Is that this regular?
• Can I realistically do something to cut back the quantity of information written to swap / by kernel_task?