[M1 MacBook Pro] Memory pressure when waking from sleep

There is nothing wrong with your MacBook Air. I have an 8GB RAM model and experience the same behavior during wake-up. When you wake your Air from sleep it needs to move things around in memory to restore the session state and that exhausts the physical memory and leads to swapping to disk during that brief period you describe. Also, notice that your swap space (disk) is 2.8 GB more than the 16 GB RAM. As fast as the Air's SSD, it is not as fast as the onboard memory leading to this lag. Quitting applications, not in use, mitigates the issue prior to closing the lid. The less that has to be restored, the less time it takes.

Hey there, musicory.

We understand that upon waking your MacBook Pro, it can run out of memory. Do you have any apps listed under the Login Items tab in System Preferences > User & Groups > select your user? If so, does removing those and adding back one by one indicate one app might be causing this issue.

Some other steps you can also take is to ensure your MacBook Pro is fully updated, along with installed apps being updated, and a restart.

• How to update the software on your Mac
• Use the App Store to update apps on Mac
• Log out, sleep, wake, restart, or shut down your Mac 

The steps may seem simple, but can sometimes help resolve issues. If you've already done those steps or if the issue continues, you can also test in safe mode and in a temporary test user. Both of those steps can help isolate this issue further.

• How to use safe mode on your Mac
• Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Safe mode runs certain checks on your MacBook Pro. You'll want to test to see if the issue continues after you restart out of safe mode. A test user can show us if the issue is only happening in your user or if it is system wide.

We look forward to your reply. Take care!

musicory,

Thank you for letting us know those additional details. We suggested login items because we wanted to see if those apps launching might be causing an issue. Testing in a new user and safe mode can help test macOS and let us isolate more. If the issue happens in both safe mode, out of safe mode, and in a test user, you will want to back up your data and then reinstall macOS:

• Back up your Mac
• How to reinstall macOS

Best wishes.

I have this problem too, and I have never had it in any of my pre-M1 Macs.

That includes the 16” beside me that is an exact replica — down to every login item and every app — and that I’ve used in exactly the same way with the same apps and same usage patterns.

Any memory intensive app seems to cause this. Safari with lots of tabs is my most common culprit; the Miro desktop app is another.

I have a similar issue. It doesn't say I've ran out of memory, but when i resume the laptop after not using it for an hour it's very slow for a minute or two. It seems like everything got swapped out and has to swap back in.