M1/M2 performance is very sensitive to memory pressure. The system will automatically swap if it needs to, but performance will degrade significantly when it does.
We recommend you use _attention slicing_ to reduce memory pressure during inference and prevent swapping, particularly if your computer has lass than 64 GB of system RAM, or if you generate images at non-standard resolutions larger than 512 × 512 pixels. Attention slicing performs the costly attention operation in multiple steps instead of all at once. It usually has a performance impact of ~20% in computers without universal memory, but we have observed _better performance_ in most Apple Silicon computers, unless you have 64 GB or more.
We recommend you use _attention slicing_ to reduce memory pressure during inference and prevent swapping, particularly if your computer has less than 64 GB of system RAM, or if you generate images at non-standard resolutions larger than 512 × 512 pixels. Attention slicing performs the costly attention operation in multiple steps instead of all at once. It usually has a performance impact of ~20% in computers without universal memory, but we have observed _better performance_ in most Apple Silicon computers, unless you have 64 GB or more.
