Rosetta 2 Won’t Let the Undead Die
You might think that apps are either running or they’re not, but there are actually four different states a macOS ap can be in (in addition to those a user shouldn’t directly encounter, such as suspended).
[…]
Intel apps running with Rosetta translation […] appear to persist far longer in an undead state than on Intel systems. I’m unsure whether this is deliberate, to minimise the cost of loading them again should the user decide to open that app once more, or a passing phase. But if you run many apps in Rosetta which join the ranks of the undead, it could get inconvenient.
[…]
When napping apps are restored after a restart, they aren’t fully loaded and put into App Nap. Instead, macOS starts to load them and then stops at _dyld_start, so they only take around 8 KB of memory and don’t open any of their other files, such as frameworks. […] This can cause strange problems with some apps which you may leave running in App Nap. When in App Nap, they can be awoken by different events as well as the user bringing them to the front. When they’re in this stopped state, they have insufficient code loaded to respond to events which would normally wake them from App Nap, unless you manually wake them up after starting up.
See also: Felix Schwarz.
Previously:
- Mail App Extensions
- App Nap, Automatic Termination, and Zombie Apps
- Mountain Lion Is (Still) a Quitter
