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Sanpete

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Nov 17, 2016
3,695
1,668
Utah
I got my base 16" M1 Pro last Wednesday. Four or five days ago I set up Safari Technology Preview (STP) on it, which is just Safari with some experimental features and developer tools. For the purposes of this post, I'm pretty sure it's no different than regular Safari. It hasn't updated since I installed it.

I opened 9 tabs in one window, and 2 more in one of 3 other windows that I opened to fill later (I typically have 40 or so tabs open), so I could divide up the screen real estate with Chrome (just a couple tabs for now) and TextEdit, my very favorite productivity tool. Also had regular Safari open with a couple tabs, the App Store, and soon the Activity Monitor. Oh, and I opened an STP window for the BBC World Service player somewhere along the way. Nothing else.

To set up STP, I hid the favorites bar, selected compact tabs, fiddled with a couple other settings, and all was fine.

Until it wasn't. On about the second day after installation while tweaking more settings in the browser and system (don't recall what, nothing real tricky), I noticed STP stopped showing tab thumbnails when I hovered over tabs, and the cursor started to flicker when over a link or button. The app gradually stopped showing the name and url of the tab, or showed the wrong ones, and then tabs started freezing. Got slower and slower, I often had to close and reopen tabs to reanimate them. Safari and Chrome continued to work fine with 2 or 3 tabs each.

I tried altering settings, reinstalling the browser, restarting, and so on, none of which fixed it. So I just kept using it in its hobbled state while thinking I might figure it out. That went on since night before last if I recall right.

And then some time into ordinary use today it stopped misbehaving, for no apparent reason. Completely back to normal.

During this time, the memory pressure was building because of WindowServer, which is now "consuming" 19GB of my 16GB memory. It's been yellow for days, higher now than it was when I was having trouble, so I don't think that's related. Edit: But it too has been fixing itself since I wrote this.

STP was using more resources while misbehaving, so I see a difference there, but it wasn't an extravagant amount, and nothing has changed in my usage. Same windows open doing the same things, just better now.

Don't know what to make of that. It does make me wonder if some of the issues reported here where people respond by saying they don't have that issue may be of a similar sort. Gremlins, you know.
 
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WindowServer memory allocation is gradually falling, down about a GB over the last hour, with no change in my usage. Maybe the OS woke up and decided to get to work fixing bugs. Haven't updated it since last week, though. Of course, almost 18BG is still way too much for WindowServer.

Edit: Thought it might be compressing more memory to produce the fall in memory assigned to WindowServer, but compressed memory is also decreasing.
 
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The WindowServer memory has fallen steadily through the day to below 13GB, and is still decreasing. Compressed memory has gone up and down but averages about the same as it was early in the day, a little over 8 GB.
 
WindowServer is now down to 1.13GB memory, way down from the high I saw of almost 19GB. Compressed memory has fallen to 3GB. Memory pressure is in the green. No changes in what I've been doing, apart from another tab or two open.

1.13GB is still high, but a lot more manageable than 19. Seems to have settled at that amount. Was using more than a full core of CPU (i.e. read 100+%), now down to under 20%.
 
I have a 16" m1 max/64gb of ram and I ran into a similar issue where windowserver was taking an exorbitant amount of CPU. i ended up ending the process which basically logged me out of my session and i logged back in and have been fine ever since. not exactly sure whats up with it tbh
 
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