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

Gorio said:
Does anyone know a good memory cleaner? One expensive I was not anticipating with 32Gb of RAM.
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MallardDuck said:
Bingo. Best option is open terminal and do 'sudo purge'. But don't know if that will solve this particular problem.
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I use an app called MenuBar Stats after having been a long time iStat Menus app guy. It seems that, at least for me, iStat Menus freezes up OFTEN, causing a number of other slowdowns with Finder and various other open apps. Since I've switched to MenuBar Stats, I haven't had any issues like that...

apps.apple.com

MenuBar Stats App - App Store

Download MenuBar Stats by Fabrice Leyne on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like MenuBar Stats.
apps.apple.com apps.apple.com

It's my understanding that when 3rd Party apps like these offer an option to Free Memory, it's really just running a 'sudo purge' command anyway? Maybe I'm wrong. I've never had issues using a 3rd Party app to purge memory, though.
 
amartinez1660 said:
I agree completely with your take, however the other part is this: did anybody of the thousands of people behind creating the OS noticed that Firefox, or Control Center or anything was eating away all the memory? I find this either crazy or it’s happening in rare enough instances that nobody caught it for all these testing months.

To be honest, whoever’s responsibility it might ultimately be, for us the user clients is becoming a bit too much I think.
If today’s applications are exponentially more complex, then just take the required more time for that… the biggest offenders in my opinion are those console games which take 200GB to install to soon after have a Day-0 hotfix patch of also 200GB. Give me a break, imagine if Nintendo during the NES era launched non working games? The only reason companies are getting away with it is because there’s a (luckily) failsafe mechanism in place.

That said, yes, I installed Big Sur not that long ago, I stopped hearing about bugs and issues for long enough.
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Its possible because apple likely doesn't make it a practice to test 3rd party apps. Plus I'm not entirely sure how many still use Firefox. Most Apple users prefer to use Safari and those that do not likely use Chrome instead. It is very possible the more power users that bother to take a chance and beta test don't use Firefox all that much anymore. I'm a software developer and almost exclusively use Safari and Chrome. If I bothered to beta test MacOS I would not even consider installing Firefox to test.

I just did a quick general search of browser user stats and its 65% Chrome, 19% Safari and 3% Firefox. I think thats all users and not just the Mac users which could have even less percentage using Firefox. Combine that with the power users actually brave enough to beta test and you can see very few may have actually attempted to try Firefox.
 
gank41 said:
I use an app called MenuBar Stats after having been a long time iStat Menus app guy. It seems that, at least for me, iStat Menus freezes up OFTEN, causing a number of other slowdowns with Finder and various other open apps. Since I've switched to MenuBar Stats, I haven't had any issues like that...

apps.apple.com

MenuBar Stats App - App Store

Download MenuBar Stats by Fabrice Leyne on the App Store. See screenshots, ratings and reviews, user tips, and more games like MenuBar Stats.
apps.apple.com apps.apple.com

It's my understanding that when 3rd Party apps like these offer an option to Free Memory, it's really just running a 'sudo purge' command anyway? Maybe I'm wrong. I've never had issues using a 3rd Party app to purge memory, though.
Click to expand...
Interesting...does it 'notch'? istat hasn't updated to handle it yet.
 
sigh....Monterey has ruined my M1 MBA, i only use Safari and both CPU usage and Memory usage are ridiculously high. The computer becomes extremely hot as well after just a few minutes, basically unusable when previously it was cold to the touch

really frustrating, can't believe Apple released such a flawed update
 
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Get this too on my brand new base M1 Pro.
Screen Shot 2564-11-12 at 08.51.10.png
 
So, the last two days Safari has stopped loading pages and gives me this error message:

Safari Can’t Open the Page

Safari can’t open the page. The error is: “The operation couldn’t be completed. No space left on device” (NSPOSIXErrorDomain:28)

I have to quit Safari, then restart it to get it to work again. What's weird is that I have to re-log into all the accounts that were open (e.g., email accounts, MacRumors Forum, etc.). Anyone else have this problem? Seems to be related to memory. SSD has 1.3 TB free.
 
Romain_H said:
There is no such thing as a „good memory cleaner“. “Memory cleaners“ are little more than snake oil and are pretty much useless, they do more harm than good. Better stay away
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What do they actually do behind the scenes and why does it cause more harm than good?
 
maxoakland said:
What do they actually do behind the scenes and why does it cause more harm than good?
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1 - Empty RAM is like an empty fridge. RAM is fast access, so anything in RAM does not need to get fetched from the NAND. So you WANT the RAM to be as full as possible

2 - Operating systems today are pretty good in tracking RAM usage. I.e, if RAM is full and the operating system needs more, it swaps out a part of the RAM it considers most dispensable (ideally, a copy of mentioned RAM segment is already written out to the swap/NAND, so the respective RAM can be freed right away). RAM cleaners have no such knowledge about app memory usage and potentially interfere with the OS.
 
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maxoakland said:
What do they actually do behind the scenes and why does it cause more harm than good?
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Without getting to deep into this, sometimes it may cause slowness on running applications (must re-add data into RAM) or even sudden crash (not being able to get past this).

If RAM is needed, will be released automatically so actually you never need any memory cleaner. The OS is able to manage this.

RAM is there to be used.
Free ram = wasted ram actually.

That is unless you have a bug like this memory leak and in this situation you either restart the application that is using it more than usual or restart the OS.
 
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Disagree a bit with the notion that free ram is wasted ram. It takes a finite amount of energy to write data to ram, so no point in doing that unless there's data that's needed somewhere, now or, in the case of cached files or compressed memory, the future. But otherwise agree with the gist of the comments, that the OS is quite capable of managing its ram.
 
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johnalan said:
Memory leak still present in beta 2. Unbelievable.
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Since I started watching the leaks in Activity Monitor and zapping them as soon as they start up, I’ve had no leaks of any consequence. I also use an app called Memory Diag, which allows me to recycle memory at a click, and so I keep the Ram available at a high level all the time.

I did just have to do a restart when I noticed the Finder at close to 600 GB which is unusual. I could have restarted it but I figured a restart would stabilize everything.
 
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Romain_H said:
1 - Empty RAM is like an empty fridge. RAM is fast access, so anything in RAM does not need to get fetched from the NAND. So you WANT the RAM to be as full as possible

2 - Operating systems today are pretty good in tracking RAM usage. I.e, if RAM is full and the operating system needs more, it swaps out a part of the RAM it considers most dispensable (ideally, copy of mentioned RAM segment is already written out to the swap/NAND, so the respective RAM can be freed right away). RAM cleaners have no such knowledge about app memory usage and potentially interfere with the OS.
Click to expand...
Also the newer ones don’t just clean memory. They just hog a ton of ram in an attempt to get the OS to “free” it up. Except it doesn’t and everything gets swapped out instead. So going back to your usual apps, it needs to swap in from the disk so you get a nice lag.


utter garbage
 
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It would be good to know if people are experiencing this on the 14 or 16 or both.
I experienced on 16 only.

Finder memory leak when searching on clean system

16 M1 MacBook Pro. 16/1TB
12.01 And 12.1 Finder memory leak. No software on clean install. (Indexed system)
Everytime I search for a file the activity monitor shows increased finder ram usage starts at 26mb then keeps going to 600mb+ After a few searches the "Loading status comes up" searches that used to be quick are taking minutes.
12.1 Beta did not fix.

Went to store to try the floor demo.
16 M1 MacBook Pro 16/512 in the store had the SAME memory leak issue. Finder searches increase the ram used as shown in Activity monitor continually.
14 M1 MacBook Pro 16/512 DID NOT have the finder memory leak issue.
My Big Sur M1 Air does not have the finder search issue.

I have a 14 MBP on order and the 16 is going back.
 
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Since1985 said:
It would be good to know if people are experiencing this on the 14 or 16 or both.
I experienced on 16 only.

Finder memory leak when searching on clean system

16 M1 MacBook Pro. 16/1TB
12.01 And 12.1 Finder memory leak. No software on clean install. (Indexed system)
Everytime I search for a file the activity monitor shows increased finder ram usage starts at 26mb then keeps going to 600mb+ After a few searches the "Loading status comes up" searches that used to be quick are taking minutes.
12.1 Beta did not fix.

Went to store to try the floor demo.
16 M1 MacBook Pro 16/512 in the store had the SAME memory leak issue. Finder searches increase the ram used as shown in Activity monitor continually.
14 M1 MacBook Pro 16/512 DID NOT have the finder memory leak issue.
My Big Sur M1 Air does not have the finder search issue.

I have a 14 MBP on order and the 16 is going back.
Click to expand...
I experience this on my M1 MBP 13in on macOS 12.0.1
 
It is a serious problem on my 14", 10 core, 1Tb, 32Gb MBP, one browser with two tabs is currently over 20Gb so memory pressure is in amber.
 
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