Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Agreed. My main point in correcting you was letting people know that re-installing the OS was a waste of time; I didn't want people to think that actually worked.
I’m keeping the activity window open all the time in the hope of finding something that sets the OS off in doing the memory leak in some system item or in an app. I have ONLY found system items that have become bloated with memory, not apps, so far. I know that some people have said Firefox does it, but not in the occasions so far.
 
I had customized the color of the cursor under accessibility settings after upgrading to Monterey, started experiencing the memory leak on multiple applications (one each time bloating to 20+GB).
After reseting the cursor color back to defaults I no longer have the memory leak issue.
(all this on 12.0.1 on a M1 Mac Mini)
 
I had customized the color of the cursor under accessibility settings after upgrading to Monterey, started experiencing the memory leak on multiple applications (one each time bloating to 20+GB).
After reseting the cursor color back to defaults I no longer have the memory leak issue.
(all this on 12.0.1 on a M1 Mac Mini)
Wow... now that you mention it, I didn’t start having memory leaks until I colored the cursor. I’ll get rid of the hot pink.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Nightfury326
Just a technical comment. I have been unfortunate enough to have tracked a couple of non-trivial memory leakages. My takeaway is that they tend to have sharp edges and be something else than what they look like.

It is very difficult to see how much RAM a process really uses in a virtual memory OS. When the process allocates some memory, it is given an address range in the vast 64-bit address space. This does not necessarily mean it uses any memory at all. Only when the process tries to access addresses within the allocated memory space, it is given a physical memory pages from the RAM.

I do not claim to know the MacOS memory system too well, but in many other systems multiple processes may report the same memory if shared resources are used. RAM across the system is not the same as adding up the RAM use of all processes.

So, whether or not this is a real problem or just a bug in the memory bookkeeping depends on whether this behaviour results in excessive swapping to SSD or severe starvation of file system cache.

One possibility, of course, is that the OS has become more intolerant towards software bugs. It may be that some changes just expose bugs which have been in many pieces of software for a long time, e.g., misuse of some system facilities, etc.
Hey @DrV ,

I would say your definitely spot on for the last part - Tested on a partition fresh install only Apple apps and so far so good. I think it is time for Adobe (In My case) to iron out decade old bugs and things built on top of things that are from previous generations of code.

I really am tired of this 3rd party syndrome of pain. Apple definitely know how to keep their chins clean and it is looking like 3rd party bugs as far as I can tell.

Trouble is what good are Macs with only Apple apps!
 
  • Like
Reactions: JillStraw
I don't think I've rebooted my Macbook Air since I installed Monterey and today applications started acting up or just crashing on open. No out of memory errors but my gut said memory leak of some sort.
 


Some users who recently upgraded to macOS Monterey are experiencing a bug known as a "memory leak," a scenario in which a specific macOS process or application is bugged out and stays running for prolonged periods in the background, consuming abnormally high amounts of memory or RAM.

Monterey-Memory-LEak-Feature.jpg

It's difficult to pinpoint precisely what models of Mac computers are affected; however, the range is relatively wide, including the newly released 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Reports on Twitter, Reddit, the MacRumors Forums, and the Apple Support Communities consist of users reporting their Mac warning that the system has "run out of application memory" or that specific applications are consuming ridiculously high amounts of RAM in Activity Monitor.

Some reports call out the macOS Control Center as the main culprit, with YouTuber Gregory McFadden sharing a screenshot of Control Center using up to 20GB of RAM on their 64GB M1 Max 16-inch MacBook Pro. Other users are also sharing similar experiences on the MacRumors Forums and Reddit.



Another cluster of related reports includes Mozilla Firefox. As shown in the tweets below, Firefox for some users is taking up incredibly high amounts of memory, as high as 80GB for one user.



Excluding Firefox and Control Center related reports, more widespread reporting from users across different platforms suggest the more common bug is the pop-up "Your system has run out of application memory."

The pop-up is seemingly being shown to users despite minimal use of their Macs with considerable amounts of memory to spare. In some instances, some users have suggested that restarting the Mac helps, while others say the pop-up reappears shortly after. A user on the Apple Support Communities noted their experience:
Mac users on the MacRumors Forums (1, 2, 3, 4), the Apple Support Communities (1, 2), and Reddit, are noting similar experiences. Just earlier today, we reported on user reports that the macOS Monterey update is bricking some older Mac computers. Given that and issues surrounding memory usage for some users, it may be best for users still on macOS Big Sur to wait until the second version of macOS Monterey before upgrading.

Article Link: Users Reporting 'Memory Leak' Issues After Updating to macOS Monterey
I am seeing this issue when I try to add a file or photo to a Gmail, it takes a few seconds after I select the file for it to appear.
 
I had customized the color of the cursor under accessibility settings after upgrading to Monterey, started experiencing the memory leak on multiple applications (one each time bloating to 20+GB).
After reseting the cursor color back to defaults I no longer have the memory leak issue.
(all this on 12.0.1 on a M1 Mac Mini)
I was hoping you were right. However this evening after resetting the pointer, I found the Control center creeping up from 32MB to 197MB after watching Netflix for awhile. So while it might be one of the triggers, its not the only one. I was also using a program the converted movies from one format to another. t went wonky for some reason and I had to delete it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Nightfury326
I had customized the color of the cursor under accessibility settings after upgrading to Monterey, started experiencing the memory leak on multiple applications (one each time bloating to 20+GB).
After reseting the cursor color back to defaults I no longer have the memory leak issue.
(all this on 12.0.1 on a M1 Mac Mini)
Sir, you are a genius!

That seems to have done it. Also 12.0.1 on a new Mac Mini M1. Now I can go back to being excited again. I also think the one feature I can easiliy live without most is a colored pointer.
 
  • Love
Reactions: arefbe
The sarcasm in that first tweet made me ?

In all seriousness, may this be fixed promptly. I can’t imagine how much this messes up folks’ workflows. I’ll stay on Big Sur for awhile then.
 
No issues on my 15 inch 2015 dual graphics MacBook Pro - then again, everything after this model went to crap with all new Mac OS versions. No bricking, nothing.
 
On my late 2020 MBA running macOS Monterey the culprits are Firefox and apparently Accessibility related background process ’universalaccessd’. The latter has a tendency to grow its memory usage every time the computer wakes up from sleep (+200~Mb) to ridiculous proportions (10-12Gb) until the computer is restarted.
 
Ya'll like me and almost everyone who uses Monterey has the dreaded memory leak bug. Apple will fix it eventually.

Before then there is a simple temporary solution. Presumably you have several desktops on your mac. I have 11 at the moment. Go to one you don’t use often and open up Activity Monitor(its in your applications and on every mac). Leave it open all the time. Click on the column that tells you the use of memory by system processes and apps. Highlight(click on) any that look completely out of control, and then click on the little icon with the x in the middle of a circle. Choose force quit. If its an app it will quit and you will have to restart it. If its a process(weird names mostly) then it will quit but come back almost instantly in the small size it's supposed to be. For me about 15 minutes ago I noticed that the most common culprit, Control Center(which normally uses about 26 mb of memory) was slowly sucking more and was up to 144mb. Earlier this week I found it at 14 GB.

You can keep these little buggers from stealing memory by just keeping an eye on them. Be advised: if WindowServer is up at 1gb then its probably doing it too, and if you force quit that one, your screen will go black for about 5 seconds while the OS puts it back, and then you will have to type in your machine password again.

Hope this helps.
 
It also may BE that the MBP’s neural engine gets involved. It's known that the new Macs tend to learn how you use them and adapt to your usage. Since I started force quitting processes that grab too much memory, gradually those processes have gotten less likely to grab extra RAM.

And so the issue seems to be abating for me, and maybe because the mac is learning what I want.
 
I had customized the color of the cursor under accessibility settings after upgrading to Monterey, started experiencing the memory leak on multiple applications (one each time bloating to 20+GB).
After reseting the cursor color back to defaults I no longer have the memory leak issue.
(all this on 12.0.1 on a M1 Mac Mini)
Exactly same thing here (with MBA, late 2020 M1 w/ macOS Monterey).
Did some testing couple days ago with the mouse cursor and other accessibility options. Although I had changed the mouse pointer back to the original colours I needed to click the reset-button, and now it seems that the 'universalaccessd' process has calmed down. It stays neatly around 7Mb.

I ran some tests with browsers and other apps, kept putting my machine to sleep and waking it up countless times during this evening (writing from North EU), and nope, I haven't seen any erratic behavior with any of the apps' memory usage.

Edit: Just to add, I think I have most of if not all accessibility options turned off right now, so I can't say if it is just the pointer thing but any other thing that universalaccessd is related to.
 
Last edited:
It just leaks… errr.. works.

Guess I'll hold off on upgrading for a while longer. Running on Big Sur 11.6 and it's been solid.
I just got my new 16" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, with 16GB and 2TB and yes, this is a problem. I notice it most when I try to add a file to a mail message. I already had one freeze and had to restart.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.