Dock Exposé issue on Mac M1 Air

[Phatcat]

I don't know why, but ever since I updated dock expose my m1 air has been behaving erratically.

When I power on my mac, everything is fine and smooth, but then as soon as dock expose loads on the startup stack, everything becomes a slugfest. And I do mean everything. WindowServer at a consistent 20%+ ALL the time.

Then I went back to activity monitor and noticed kernel_task was using a lot of CPU; looking it up apple gave the reason it was doing so to protect the cpu from overheating. Overheating from booting up? And then I noticed dock expose had a long cpu time, especially given the apps size and purpose. When I force quitted the app my mac went back to working perfectly fine again.

Conclusion, something is broken , and somehow it is hiding the amount of resources it is using(!) and pushed my mac over the edge (It overheated the other day to the point of not wanting to turn on without holding the button for 10 seconds)

Ever since removing the app the issue has disappeared. WindowsServer has gone from a consistent 20%+ with dock expose down to about 3.3% while idling without it.

[steventheworker]

Someone reported something similar months ago on the discord, that user said the sluggishness was trackpad-only.

This same day I received a 2nd report from someone else, they said: "When running the app, I have to double-click or click and wait for Chrome tabs to open, and the problem stops when I quit Dock Exposé."

I don't expect you to test it again, and I do apologize for any inconvenience, but it'd be helpful to know whether you're a Chrome user, and if you ever tried it with an external mouse (are you a trackpad only user)?

I haven't been able to reproduce this myself.

[Phatcat]

I am sorry for coming in hot-headed, I was still in a bit of a mood when I wrote it. I've taken a breather and calmed a bit, and I'll take you through my entire process.

First to answer your questions; I am using chromium based browsers, but not chrome specifically, also it was the same using the trackpad as using an external mouse through a docking station.

Second, I will give you my complete setup;

I am using a Macbook Air M1 from 2020. It is connected via USB-C to a docking station with 2 1080p 144hz monitors along with all my peripherals; mouse, keyboard, external dac, usb-hub. It is quite heavily loaded, but it seems to all work without issues. The other usb-c port of the mac is connected to a 4k 60hz through an hdmi matrix - That is 3 external monitors connected while also using the built-in screen for a total of 4 screens so it would be fair to say the m1 is being pushed on my setup, it is, I know.

On the soft side, I am usually running 1 browser window in edge on the built-in monitor while running separate windows of brave on all the external monitors. It shouldn't be loading more than the active tab on each window, but that is at least 4 active tabs as a minimum being displayed - furthermore I am running the external dac in 32-bit 768 khz mode while running foobar2000. This is my usual running environment.

Even with all of these things connected and running it in this load, the macbook never gets hot, it gets warm and is usually feeling warm, but never hot, and it very very rarely lags or freezes, only when too many things are displaying at once and I am multitasking too much, basically only when I'd reasonably expect it.

My frustrations began yesterday when I got home and my Macbook m1 air was off (It only ever sleeps), while also feeling hot to the touch, which I can't claim to remember having happened before. When I tried waking it up nothing was happening, so I tried turning it on and it would not power on, so I had to press and hold down the power button (I think it's a hard reset but it could be semi-soft only, am still reasonably new to mac, hence why I am running apps that make it feel more like my old familiar windows setup - also because windows is far superior in multi-window, multi-monitor handling), and then it finally started booting.

My first suspicion was just like you; it's the browser. It must be brave. So I opened activity monitor and it told me; the biggest culprit in battery drain is brave. Great, issue has been identified, I though. So I started looking up what settings or what behavior might be causing these symptoms.

On the browser end I found people saying to turn off hardware accelleration (made no difference), people saying to look at brave's built-in task manager to see what tabs were the culprits (I did, and found that none of them were), people saying it was google's keystone being a resource hog (found out keystone is chrome specific, not applicable to brave). On the site-specific side of things I found people having issues with youtube specifically (so I closed all youtube tabs and rebooted to no difference either).

Don't judge me for my troubleshooting flow, but I finally did what I should have started off with; terminating all open visible applications, everything with an open window. So I did just that and.... no difference.. I opened activity monitor and WindowServer was consistently high. I read online people saying it was the observer effect and that activity monitor was doing this so I came away none the wiser.

I then started reading people saying these types of symptoms could be caused by lack of memory, and indeed my internal ssd is filled to the brim, so I started looking into getting external storage for some of my media rips to unload from the internal drive while contemplating which apps I could start clearing out I perhaps didn't need or use. I noticed that some of my cloud services were trying to sync and was thinking that the combination of lack of internal space along with them trying to load more files onto the drive could be the issue, so I terminated all of those and still it was sluggish.

Now I started getting worried it was the hardware that was damaged, that it had overheated and damaged the chip, cause everything was pointing this direction, especially not wanting to turn on in the beginning, i unplugged everything connected though usb, anything external and.... No change... so I ran a system diagnostic through the options menu during boot and it came back saying everything was fine. No issues.

I turned it off and set it aside and gave up for the day.

I boot it today, and I notice that everything is buttery-smooth, everything, browser windows, on all monitors, but then suddenly it stopped being smooth, and I noticed at just that moment I also got hit with a load of system notifications about background processes, along with dock expose, and it hit me. All the background applications could be doing this..

So I opened the applications window down on the dock and... it wouldn't let me select any of them. It was like it was actively trying to prevent me from cleaning up the apps. I could move my mouse around elsewhere on the screen, but whenever i tried to hover over to an app in the app window, uld simply freeze the cursor outside the applications window and not respond until I'd moved the mouse far enough and then it would simply 'appear' on the other side.

I opened activity monitor again and there it was quite a bit high up on the cpu, dock expose, so i terminated it, and yea, everything worked like a charm again. Observing activity monitor shows a high usage whenever I am 'doing stuff' like moving the cursor or switching between monitors and apps and browser tabs, but then when I go idle the windowserver goes down to about 3.3%