Hi all–first post here, GarageSale user going back to 2009.
Going to need a new Mac soon as my 12.9 M1 MacBook Pro’s SSD is now getting close to full. My GarageSale library is 138GB and growing rapidly as I have been a full-time seller for the past several years.
Any opinions/experience on what chip attributes of Apple’s M1 through M3 matter most to GarageSale performance?
Is it RAM–I have 8GB now and everyone I’ve talked to said 16GB is now a must, but that advice was given in a general, more-is-better computing sense and not specifically in regard to the GarageSale’s memory demands
With the base/Pro/Max variants within each chip class, is the huge increase in multi-core performance between chip levels relevant to GarageSale, or does it instead depend on the chip’s single core power?
I don’t think GPU is a major factor as all my photos are taken on my iPhone and editing is very minimal, but wanted to check as that seems to be a big part of how Apple is now differentiating their chips
I’m looking to be as frugal as I reasonably can, but want to make sure my next Mac will provide efficient performance for at least three years in order to justify the cost of upgrading. I also realize I could shrink my library size by deleting images of sold listings or deleting completed listings altogether, however I would prefer to maintain all of my listings within GarageSale because my workflow often involves searching for listing from many years back, and it’s just so convenient when it is all right there.
I understand the desire to keep the older data, but I am moved to say I’ve found that I can keep the Orders table in GS, and offload the actual Listings to disk. Then, when I need to find a detail from an older listing, I can usually use Alfred or Spotlight to search the contents of the .gslisting files.
(I’ve just checked to make sure I’m not accidentally lying, and yes I searched for text in an exported Listing gslisting and it immediately showed up in Spotlight search)
For me, this is especially helpful, since I stop and re-start listings frequently, on the order of 3000+ every month, so my db would be many times larger than yours is.
16GB should be fine. If you can afford more, that’s good, but I doubt you’ll see performance benefits beyond 16 GB (unless you have a lot of other apps running at the same time as GS).
For GS, single core performance is king. Since on macOS interfaces updates can only happen on the main thread of an app, and updating the user interface (smart groups, overview summaries, etc.) in response to user actions or data received from eBay is what is responsible for small hangs in GS, you won’t see much performance improvements with more cores.
There is not much hard computing in GarageSale that could be offloaded to secondary threads. And the tasks that already happen on secondary threads (network communication, writing changes to disk) aren’t exactly demand for today’s chip either.
I read somewhere that some of the new M3 chips have more bandwidth to RAM or SSD than others, so that’s what I would pay attention.
This is exactly what I do, stop and re-start 3000+ listings every month.
In GarageSale I have 183,828 Listings and 45,273 Orders.
My Containers:GarageSale folder is 153.78 GB with 385,304 items, mostly photos.
I just upgraded my 16GB M1 iMac to a 24GB M3 iMac, and have not noticed any big difference, just a bit snappier, but I am pretty happy with it. 16GB was fine, but more is usually better.
I also have kept all my previous listings in GS to search for old listings when listing similar items.
Does GS use multiple cores, and multiple threads, when Updating eBay Listings and uploading multiple listings, as the Activity Viewer window seems to show all the photos for 4 listings being uploaded serially?
Here is my simple AppleScript for counting all GS listings and orders:
tell application “GarageSale”
set listingCount to (count of every ebay listing) as string
set orderCount to (count of every ebay order) as string
set resultOutput to (listingCount & " listings, " & orderCount & " orders")
end tell
resultOutput
Output: “183919 listings, 45286 orders”
That includes 140,160 Deleted Listings and 17,053 Deleted Orders
Thanks, Ilya for all these details on what hardware matters most when using GarageSale, and Neal for your insightful workflow and AppleScript expertise. The developer support and user community here is fantastic and I learn so much every time I read the user forum.
Today I snagged a basically new (certified pre-owned with 3 battery cycles) M1 MacBook Pro 16-inch 16GB/1TB for $1500–for anyone in the US with a Micro Center store near them, it seemed like a pretty good deal for a nicer Mac than I’m normally accustomed to.
I’m using a iMac 24-inch, 2023, Apple M3, 24 GB Memory.
Here are several screen recordings showing both Start Listings and Relist Listings. In the Activity Window it appears that the “Uploading picture to eBay” is all done serially??? Then after all the photos for 4 listings have been uploaded in serial, then the “Starting listing with title” for the 4 listings seems to happen in parallel.
