Users Reporting 'Memory Leak' Issues After Updating to macOS Monterey

[johnalan]

Bullsh*t


It ain't gonna fix anything, it happens on brand-new M1 MacBook Pros.

Correct. Happening on one literally OOTB.

 

[Graphikos]

I know it's not quite the same thing, but I thought this was funny given the subject matter. It seems most pages on Macrumors give me the same "This webpage was reloaded..." warning. I'm using a 2020 M1 MBPro...

This is actually a pretty cool feature. I use a Tab Suspender plugin in Chrome just to shut down tabs I've left in the background for too long.

 

[kingtj1971]

I called apple support; they said they were unaware of any widespread issue.

They had me create a new user to see if that fixed the issue (it did not).

They then had me re-install the OS. So far not seeing the issue recur, but it's only been a few hours.

If that doesn't fix it, the support representative said they would escalate to engineering. She also said if enough people escalate to engineering, they would acknowledge it as a widespread issue and post a message; therefore, I'd encourage you all to reach out to apple support as well.

Will keep an eye on this. Just upgraded an iMac Pro to it but didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, performance-wise, so far. Haven't really used it enough since the upgrade to be sure though, yet.

I can also tell you though from previous experience? Many times, Apple Support will claim they're "unaware" of an issue, yet folks there in Engineering are absolutely aware of it already. They just didn't tell their front line support staff about it yet, since they're still investigating and don't have any definitive advice on how to correct it. The folks answering the support lines at Apple will only know an issue is "widespread" if they're getting a large number of calls coming in about it, to the point where they notice because it keeps coming up repeatedly when they answer the phone.

 

[Outer_net]

Apple have advised that it is a known issue and have suggested that "involvement of our Senior department is necessary." to resolve the issue. Unless senior tech can update Monterey they are just mollycoddling us through this, especially for those that have spent all there £$£ and now realise they have the same old ? MacBookPro syndrome.

What's it going to take for things to just bloody work ?!?
#crapbooknoooooo

Other Monterey issues are Safari tab groups going a bit Pete tong - updating and overwriting whatever you have open or just crashing.

External connected HDMI displays not reconnecting when waking from sleep, requiring physical disconnection / reconnection to get it back on.

Display settings keeps turning off High Dynamic Range for my connected display whenever making changes to any display arrangements or settings.

iCloud private relay turning off on its own

iCloud Private relay not working on non Apple apps

Some apps that use a second display are going weird Lightroom classic for example - Zoom won't work correctly or consistently and toggling the second display between full screen and windowed helps other times it doesnt.

Mission control apps that have been placed into other desktops reset whenever the Mac restarts or screens are connected / disconnected.

 

[Realityck]

Happened on my iMac 24" w/8GB and all I was doing was watching Twitch in Safari when I got the "this website is using a lot of RAM" or whatever it said. Checked the memory pressure and it was all good but never happened before the Monterey update. Apple is really starting to frustrate me with all these unoptimized OS releases across their devices. I have no doubt Apple will royal screw up their new universal control feature if it even releases this year.

I seen that on occasion occur with safari with 24" iMac with 16GB/1TB config during Monterey beta cycle but didn't associate it with this issue of some applications failing to release allocated memory properly under Monterey. Still keeping my eye open for related instances using 12.1 beta. Not using iCloud whatsoever.

 

[decat]

I love this feature, but disabling it if it helps. So far no dice though. Has anyone tried killing the process? Does it restart itself? I don't really want to try with all my workflow open.

I had the memory leak issue on 30/10 and 1/11. Started searching for the issue on Google.
In my case Firefox was gourmand on memory. Although the latest beta got installed just a couple of days ago I never linked the issue to it. So while searching for memory leak firefox I read something on bugzilla, posted recentely. Someone suggested turning this feature off, so I did., the leak stopped.
I re-enabled it a couple of hours ago and will see how it goes the next couple of days. Doing night shifts, so I'm not using it much atm.

 

[Shirasaki]

870 tabs? Are you ok @filchermcurr? Do you need someone to talk to?

Not just that. Safari tab is one key combo away from vanishing into the void. I lost hundreds of tabs because of this and I am extremely wary about closing safari on iOS.

 

[nebojsak]

First off. I never called anyone stupid, nor did I tell them not to update. All I said is, if its important for that person to have a stable release, they shouldn't be updating to a .0 release. It has nothing to do with being stupid or smart, its about understanding your own circumstance and knowing how major bugs will affect you or your work. I even update one of my non-critical home computers on day 1. When I was younger I would have jumped on the public betas too. The difference is I am not surprised and not up in arms about bugs because I am expecting them to be there. Your expectation of a .0 release being bug free it not realistic nor obtainable from any company, so banging your head on the wall year after year and saying bugs shouldn't be there will just result in a sore head . My second point was solely to explain, that stretching the updates to three years instead of one will not solve the problem and may make it even worse. I am not sure why any of my points are contentious or rub you the wrong way. All I did was offer a solution to those that don't want to deal with bugs or require stable machines.

At least they should fix issues that are present and well documented in betas (external monitors or usb hubs issues) or through previous releases (Apple Mail). So, official .0 release should be out when those issues are fully inspected and resolved. And this is not the case because 1 year cycle and WWDC and brand new hardware to sell.

 

[caric]

Just curious; are machines actually grinding to a halt (which would be a symptom of running out of memory), or is it just an alert? The latter is annoying, and shouldn't be happening, but not a huge problem.

just an alert, but sometimes the OS will kill an app or two.

 

[zarathu]

I have the bug on my M1Pro with 16 GB ram running 12.0 A restart fixes it. I also have an app called Memory diagnosis which might fix it. When I checked the Control center was using 14.25 GB when it normally uses 14.25 MB. I had 93 GB of swapping out.

 

[zarathu]

Haven't seen anything like it so far on macOS Monterey on my Mac mini M1. I did have issues during the BETA with one of Apple's beta logging services hogging 100% CPU all of the time. The logging service was still running in X86 so I managed to fix it by simply re-installing and instead of using the BETA profile which enforces you to enable Rosetta2 I enabled BETA using terminal without having to enable Rosetta2 and thus the logging service could never run as it's a X86 compiled service and I didn't have any issues ever since. These logging services are not a part of GA releases.

When it comes to memleaks one have to wonder if it's really a bug? The screenshot from the article shows no swapping. If there is no swapping, how would we know that Control Center isn't simply using the ample amount of free RAM for caching? Unused RAM is wasted RAM, especially as RAM is volatile so you won't be saving any power/battery by not using it either.

It's quite common for modern operating systems to try utilise all of the memory it has available at all times as RAM is much faster than NVME storage, and unlike NVME storage there is no limitation of the amount of read/writes it can sustain until performance starts degrading. So you want to put as much into RAM as possible.

When facing memory leaks you would normally have situations where applications keep on using more and more memory without ever clearing up which will end up with you starting to swap as a result of these applications having memory leaks is causing you to get memory starved so the NVME storage has to act as a additional memory swap.


But the screenshot in the article doesn't show swapping. I can't really understand why control center would need to use 20GB+ for cache so that is most likely some kind of bug from Apple. But I'm not entirely sure if it's a memory leak. If it's a leak it should mean that control center would never lower it's memory usage even though you are starting to reach 100% memory utilisation causing you to start swapping.

Activity monitor showed 93 gb swapping on my M1Pro.

 

[Graphikos]

During the night......

 

[gank41]

Just curious; are machines actually grinding to a halt (which would be a symptom of running out of memory), or is it just an alert? The latter is annoying, and shouldn't be happening, but not a huge problem.

The couple times this has happened to me, regardless of what app I close, every app becomes non-responsive and opening new apps just bounce in my dock. I’ve had no choice but to reboot.

 

[resoverlord]

Re-install did not fix it, it came back after 8 or 9 hours. I'll call back apple support to escalate to engineering

 

[buckwheet]

Okay, this is very lame... hopefully Apple will have a fix soon. I haven't seen the problem so far, but I've been configuring/installing stuff, so I've rebooted a few times.

 

[zarathu]

Activity monitor showed 93 gb swapping on my M1Pro.

You have it. That is not appropriate.

 

[zarathu]

Re-install did not fix it, it came back after 8 or 9 hours. I'll call back apple support to escalate to engineering

Yes it did. What happened is that you used some process or app that set it off again. Did you try stopping the app or process that is drawing all the memory using Activity Monitor?

 

[zarathu]

During the night......

View attachment 1901460

Turn off control center in the Activity Monitor.

 

[resoverlord]

Yes it did. What happened is that you used some process or app that set it off again. Did you try stopping the app or process that is drawing all the memory using Activity Monitor?

The process is "control center". It's built into the operating system. I can't turn it off or on.

so, No, it did not.

 

[resoverlord]

Ticket got escalated to engineering; we'll see what comes back from that.

 

[johnalan]

Ticket got escalated to engineering; we'll see what comes back from that.

Nice work. This is core OS for sure.

 

[Graphikos]

Ticket got escalated to engineering; we'll see what comes back from that.

You have to imagine that some of these engineers would be on these forums also. At least lurking around. I like to think so at least. I'm sure Tim Cook himself has lurked around.

One of us... one of us...

 

[zarathu]

The process is "control center". It's built into the operating system. I can't turn it off or on.

so, No, it did not.

Well I cannot speak for you. However, my control center was running at 14 GB, so I used Activity monitor to stop it. It stopped and returned at its normal 42 mb.

I also recently found something called universalaccessed(404) running suddenly at 1.2 gb when its normally 25MB. I stopped it too. It came back right away, but back to 25MB and when it was stopped my available free memory jumped briefly to 10.64GB.

So anytime you find that the bug has leaked somewhere else, its easy to bring it back by stopping the process or app in Activity Monitor.

 

[resoverlord]

Well I cannot speak for you. However, my control center was running at 14 GB, so I used Activity monitor to stop it. It stopped and returned at its normal 42 mb.

I also recently found something called universalaccessed(404) running suddenly at 1.2 gb when its normally 25MB. I stopped it too. It came back right away, but back to 25MB and when it was stopped my available free memory jumped briefly to 10.64GB.

So anytime you find that the bug has leaked somewhere else, its easy to bring it back by stopping the process or app in Activity Monitor.

Your comment was that the re-install fixed it; it did not. Having to continuously kill the process is not a fix, it's a bandaid.

 

[zarathu]

Your comment was that the re-install fixed it; it did not. Having to continuously kill the process is not a fix, it's a bandaid.

OK ---a bandaid. But it's a fast bandaid, much faster and easier than restarting the computer. And it works, if temporarily, until Apple produces a patch.