Sonoma thoughts - not all photos related

[cfc62]

So, a few months ago I wrote up the thread on "Analysis of Photoanalysis data" and said I would look at Sonoma at some point.

Given that I had issues with my Sonoma beta and there were also some well-known issues with functionality I use daily, I did not update to Sonoma until the .1 release came out.

For a few days, I was pretty happy with Sonoma, but then I noticed a clearly increased amount of processing going on. Lots of new services popping up, old services looking more aggressive and so on. My poor Intel Mac mini was being hammered up to 25% CPU usage for days on end, with clearly increased temperatures in my media cabinet. My M1 mini was also being hit, but not quite as hard, and it remained cool regardless.

Here's the Intel mini CPU usage, note the period on the left with the high CPU usage. This wasn't stopping, so I took some action:

What I noticed was that the processes and services that were running were AI/ML data collection on... me. But, these minis are servers, so it's somewhat silly to be collecting that sort of data on these machines. So, on November 5th I turned off all of the surplus services on the Intel mini, and you can see the immediate change it made. (The gap is where I was away from home and turned off the servers).

I mean, it was over a week from when I upgraded to Sonoma to where I lost patience with this data collection. I could see no end to when it was going to finish, and even then, what was the point?

These processes are extremely shy, in that if you have any activity on the machine at all, they'll immediately cease. On one hand, if Apple is just making sure these processes/services stay out of the way while you're doing something, then fine. But if they want to stay hidden, I'm less happy about that.

OK, let's tie this to Photos.

On my M1 mini server, I have a backup copy of my .photoslibrary as the system library. Photoanalysisd seemed to chew through it quickly, but I do have ~1000 video assets in there (timelapses, video snippets, etc). On the M1 mini, mediaanalysisd has been popping up very frequently since I upgraded, sometimes as much as every couple of minutes.

As far as I can tell, mediaanalysisd is only looking at media within the .photoslibrary, as I don't have any other media on my M1 mini. However, I've never been able to capture this explicitly with 'lsof' .

But what's puzzling is the fact that it's still running, a month after I upgraded to Sonoma. These aren't long videos, 5-10 seconds. As mentioned before, I've got ~1000 of them, so if photoanalysisd is running (let's say) 15 times an hour, it should get through 360 in a day, and therefore should be done chewing on my media files in about 3 days.

But here we are more than a month later and it's still chewing. Am I really gaining anything from this? Is there something magical that's being found through the analysis that will make it worth the CPU cycles?

So, yes, a bit frustrated. But I think I understand what Apple is doing, they're collecting data now so when they roll out their promised AI/ML on-device enhancements in the next release, there's already a corpus of on-machine data to work with. But right now I'm not seeing much of any benefit TBH.

Another Sonoma Photos change which they clearly telegraphed was that analysis wasn't going to work for Photo libraries stored externally, and that now seems to be the case. Note, I don't think they've ceased actually doing the analysis, they're just not giving access to it.

So, on my M1 MBP Max where I have the master stored internally, I get this message when in the "Days" tab of Library:

For my backup servers (the aforementioned Intel and M1 Mac minis) the backup libraries are stored externally, and there's no such message. It's just blank.

On my MBP, I get the "enhanced info" indicator when I look at certain photos:

And in the photo, there will be an indicator of what can be clicked on for more info:

None of this is available on my servers with identical libraries stored externally. So, they've shut that off, which is aggravating, as it means you'll have to buy the (horridly expensive) internal storage in order to hold larger libraries. I think it's time to start culling...

Having said that, the feature is quite poor. I was visiting an art gallery with some famous pieces in it, and it mis-labeled every single one. For others, it just tells me the address - which I already know given the GPS coordinates are captured. Oh, it'll tell me chocolate cake is... chocolate cake and steer me to recipes, but... ?

So again, a work in progress perhaps, but the artificial limitations are galling, and the accuracy is quite suspect and the things it tells me are on the order of "duhhhhhh."

OK, lots of text, sorry. But I will now take some time to run another "analysis of photoanalysisd analysis" on Sonoma now that I have Sonoma under control.