I wanted to put this out into the world just in case this is happening to anyone else. It seems pretty obvious about what should have been done in hindsight, but it took me a few days to resolve this one. Hopefully it's helpful to someone else.
I leave my computer running 24/7 and returned from vacation to find a weird error about being out of memory and needing to close programs. I think it has been well over a decade since I last saw a message like that. I use iStat Menus and have a good sense about my RAM utilization based off of that - with 64 GB of RAM on my system that shouldn't have exceeded 50% utilization when idling, this was pretty concerning. I rebooted my computer and didn't think anything of it... until I saw my memory usage creeping up over the course of a few hours, reaching the 70% range and engaging the swap file.
Looking at Activity Monitor did not reveal any clear targets for the RAM usage, but I noticed a crash reports process that was taking about 1 GB of memory. There were no popup dialogs about reporting a program crash at any time, so that was puzzling. I killed the process and the RAM utilization went down somewhat... but the process kept reopening, and the RAM usage kept going up with time if I didn't kill the process. Worried that there was some issue with the actual crash reporter, I checked the Console. That's when I saw that a program I had installed a few years ago, EPOS Connect (for headset management - that I was no longer actively utilizing), was crashing almost constantly, over and over again. I would guess that it had a background update that caused some sort of instability. As I no longer use that headset, I removed the program and the crash reporter stopped opening. RAM usage has returned to normal.
I leave my computer running 24/7 and returned from vacation to find a weird error about being out of memory and needing to close programs. I think it has been well over a decade since I last saw a message like that. I use iStat Menus and have a good sense about my RAM utilization based off of that - with 64 GB of RAM on my system that shouldn't have exceeded 50% utilization when idling, this was pretty concerning. I rebooted my computer and didn't think anything of it... until I saw my memory usage creeping up over the course of a few hours, reaching the 70% range and engaging the swap file.
Looking at Activity Monitor did not reveal any clear targets for the RAM usage, but I noticed a crash reports process that was taking about 1 GB of memory. There were no popup dialogs about reporting a program crash at any time, so that was puzzling. I killed the process and the RAM utilization went down somewhat... but the process kept reopening, and the RAM usage kept going up with time if I didn't kill the process. Worried that there was some issue with the actual crash reporter, I checked the Console. That's when I saw that a program I had installed a few years ago, EPOS Connect (for headset management - that I was no longer actively utilizing), was crashing almost constantly, over and over again. I would guess that it had a background update that caused some sort of instability. As I no longer use that headset, I removed the program and the crash reporter stopped opening. RAM usage has returned to normal.
