New M1 Mini memory leaks?

[abbeybound]

Just made the jump to Apple silicon in December. We are an all Apple household, but were fairly low end before the new mini. 2014 & 2015 Airs, and 2011 mini server. Honestly had no complaints about any of the machines, the Airs are still in daily service. In other words the bar was set pretty low.

For the most part I have been extremely impressed with the M1. Lately though some cracks have started to form in that opinion. This thing seems to absolutely suck with memory management, which really surprises me with how fast SSD swap ought to be. We're not pushing it at all most of the time - it's purpose in life is mostly web browsing, some Pages, occasional Spotify, and messages/facetime. My wife will complain that it isn't running well, which is an understatement. The cursor will barely move sometimes. Activity monitor will show a Safari web page or maybe the News or Stocks app consuming up to 6 GB (out of 8) of memory, pushing pressure into the red. It usually happens when two users are logged in, but no more than maybe a dozen tabs between them. Rarely the open tab causing problems. Updated, restarted, no change. All was set up from scratch / no restore or anything.

So.. is this normal? I'm annoyed that this brand new machine seems worse at juggling a few tabs than my 2014 Air.. Any suggestions beyond a wipe and reinstall?

 

[DanielFNG]

Lately I have been having some similar troubles with my M1 Air. Every so often performance will become poor, with beachballs and unresponsive apps. At one point I even had YouTube videos crashing safari. Memory pressure is high yellow/red and force quitting a bunch of apps from the dock doesn't seem to free up a significant amount of memory pressure.

I should say that I have an 8GB Air.

When this happens I restart my laptop. Memory pressure goes back in the green after that. To me it seems like there are memory leaks occurring somewhere - typically I have a processor called windowserver or similar that is consuming a lot of RAM. After a restart I can open up all my usual programs and only get to high green in memory pressure - it's only after some time that it keeps ramping up.

I don't have any dodgy programs downloaded and the vast majority of my apps are native, though there are some problem programs (e.g Matlab - but this seems to free up its memory after being force quit).

 

[appltech]

Same situation here, but not on M1 SoC.
Supposedly it can be a problem with Monterey.
On Big Sur never faced problems with memory. On Monterey – after some work Finder can use 3-4Gb!
And some apps can even crash after some time (mostly browser, thought that a problem was with a particular app but no)

For me was helpful to prevent Mac from Sleep Mode (those energy saver options) and do a restart when Mac is not needed

 

[abbeybound]

Same situation here, but not on M1 SoC.
Supposedly it can be a problem with Monterey.
On Big Sur never faced problems with memory. On Monterey – after some work Finder can use 3-4Gb!
And some apps can even crash after some time (mostly browser, thought that a problem was with a particular app but no)

For me was helpful to prevent Mac from Sleep Mode (those energy saver options) and do a restart when Mac is not needed

Wow, that's kind of.. pathetic. We'll keep plugging along I guess and hope for a software update. I was feeling like an idiot for not getting 16gb memory, but I really feel like 8 should be fine for our purposes.

 

[Tagbert]

Wow, that's kind of.. pathetic. We'll keep plugging along I guess and hope for a software update. I was feeling like an idiot for not getting 16gb memory, but I really feel like 8 should be fine for our purposes.

Having multiple users currently logged in on the device probably adds to the memory pressure.

Otherwise you should be fine for memory based on that usage. I do see some websites that will continuously increase their ram usage even when just sitting in a background tab. This forums.macrumors.com is one. It is helpful to close that tab now and then to reset it. I've seen this happen on both M1 and Intel Macs. It's probably an issue with the websites and not the processor. Activity Monitor will tell you if some particular web page is eating your ram.