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

[Sheepish-Lord]

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.

 

[nathansz]

I'm not seeing this issue on 2012 mini or 9900k hackintosh

as others have suggested it must be either specific hardware configurations or software or some combination thereof

 

[macNerd1]

Apple’s idea of merging/overlapping desktop and phone OS is creating this monster code base and it is hard to fully test across multiple device configurations. To minimize the impact on all user, they should modularize features so that ppl can opt out of certain features they don’t need. For example, I don’t need backup so why do I need to install Time Machine.

 

[BuddyTronic]

Honestly I think a big reason you're seeing this crap as of late is two fold.

1. Businessy types, not developers, are driving the software development and they want a "new every year" for business reasons and

2. Leet code interviews. These are interviews that favor kids out of college verses people who have written software the past 10+ years because instead of asking the important questions experienced devs should know, they ask tricky puzzle type questions kids out of college would know and that experienced devs haven't touched since college.

3. Maybe the new generation doesn't understand computers like the old guys.

Or maybe it’s difficult complicated stuff. They’ll fix the bugs

 

[MacBH928]

thank you beta testers ... rocking Mojave stable as a mountain ?

 

[ghanwani]

I'm tired of hearing about leaks and leakers. I thought Apple was going after leakers aggressively.

 

[svish]

Hopefully it is fixed real soon.

 

[Idgit]

Ever since Craig was placed in charge of Apple's software the quality has dropped like a stone and the number of bugs and glitches has inscreased. He needs to be shown the door

Fire Federighi

 

[sillycyber]

On top of this issue, I'm getting crashes in Safari 15 while using tabs normally and switching between tab groups.

File -> Close All Windows didn't work for me the last time I tried it. No matter how often I clicked it, the windows remained. Didn't check to see if Safari or the system was out of memory. Monterey, Safari 15. Never seen that one before.

 

[mrchinchilla]

Luckily don't have this issue on my M1 MBA. *Knocks on wood*

I've actually never encountered a serious problem after a macOS update that required downgrading or reinstalling. I think it was Sierra that was the absolute pig that gave me terrible graphics performance and graphical glitches, but outside of the odd update breaking software compatibility here and there, that's about it. *Knocks extremely hard on wood*

 

[zakarhino]

I'm not getting the same issue, all my apps have expected 'Real Memory Size' but their "virtual memory size" is all over 400GB (even small daemon apps)

 

[cababah]

Big Sur 11.6.1 exhibits the same problem. The culprit is Facetime configured in Continuity mode to initiate / accept calls from an iPhone. In this day and age to see memory leaks in modern software is literally perplexing.

I think I am actually hitting this exact issue per my post here:

14" M1P on Monterey 12.0.1 Memory Leak

I keep seeing this come up as "callservicesd"...anyone know what this is? It is using up 25GB of RAM! Closing all apps does not make it go away - only a restart. The first time I saw this was after a Zoom group call and the second time was after a group FaceTime call so I assume this is...

forums.macrumors.com

I disabled this for now to see if this addresses it but thanks for sharing that info.

 

[matrix07]

OMG!

Control Center on mine is only 40 MB (Big Sur) ?

 

[caric]

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1453763636757995521

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.

https://twitter.com/x/status/80481629

https://twitter.com/x/status/1454165129696788486

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

Not just a Monterey issue. This started happening to me over the summer on Big Sur. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253040104

 

[standing]

Lets cut people some slack? So because "some" people are impatient and must click the update button immediately when it appears, then act as if the sky is falling because of bugs in a .0 release. Only to repeat this behaviour every year as if it's some kind of surprise. I am supposed to cut them some slack when there already is a viable solution to their problem.

These same people are saying the solution is for Apple to wait 3 years between releasees which means they are now all of sudden patient for new features (just don't put that update button in front of them). I have yet to encounter one piece of software that was bug free after a major release, no matter how long it was between updates. Windows 11 was how many years in the making. Go check and see how their initial release went off. Some bugs are only found when the masses get to use it in various different situations. Changing from a one year cycle to a three year cycle will not make things any better. The .0 version will still be buggy with the probability of it being even worse since more changes will be made during a 3 year time span.

All I'm saying is that If you don't want to deal with all the initial bugs then all you need to do is have some self patience. Wait until a .4 or .5 release. After you do this once, you can return to updating every year but instead of updating from buggy .0 to .0 you are updating from a stable .5 to .5. Problem solved.

So I must have imagined your condescension towards people who are less experienced than you.

Please let’s not pretend we are talking about the one in a million bugs found after the whole world adopts the latest version of os.

They heavily advertise, then pull back features and the actual os upgrade that is left is still not stable enough to call it an official release without shame.

And according to your logic no one with a single braincell left should use the latest software, right?

Or are you actually implying people *should* upgrade so they can help Apple find more bugs?

But only the *whiners* who are not as smart as the pro user, yes?

Which is it?
Both can’t be true. You can’t say people are stupid and criticise them while simultaneously needing the „masses“ to „help“ Apple (for free) to do their job right.

 

[standing]

Apple should go to a two year OS update schedule. Besides the stability and bug factors it will also give smaller devs a chance to develop their offerings rather than constantly have to be in new macOS mode.

I don’t see how delaying innovation is what we need. They want to launch a car and a VR headset but at the same time are unable to keep up quality with the basics.

At this point I wonder if they‘ve lost too much talent, gotten way too big, too fast or simply suffer from bad management obsessed with counting beans.

 

[ducknalddon]

My thoughts. Especially with apps such as Music which must have been written exclusively on Swift. I guess it’s a problem with the OS and its memory management, as many apps experience the issue.

Was it a ground up rewrite? I'd be surprised if they just threw away everything from iTunes and started afresh.

 

[Big Jobs]

maybe this is just a HOAX perpetrated by other manufacturers to slow the mass sales of new M1 architecture - a desperate attempt to keep their customers from switching to mac ecosystem......... my M1 MacBook Pro 14" has so far exhibited ZERO behavior as described>

 

[JokerPower]

Apparently, the only usable OS for MBP 16 (2019) is macOS Catalina. I've tried freshly installed Big Sur on it and it's a joke (lags whilst typing, animations lags, overheating). I've thought about Monterey but seems to be it's not stable yet..

 

[johnalan]

I have an M1 on Big Sur and an M1 Pro on Mont, I see 26GB RAM used by ControlC on my M1 Pro, 38MB on my M1.

 

[AimeeHogan]

I just started with the memory leak issue yesterday, and come to find out, it was an extension. Grammarly was being a piggy and taking up over two GBs of RAM. LOL! I killed the extension and it seems to be doing much better now and working like it's supposed to until next time. I just have a MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's weird, I haven't had any issues with Control Centre at all.

 

[Romain_H]

There's plenty of ways to still cause a memory leak. ARC just catches the most common ones. You can still create retain cycles easily with closures and numerous other things. Also not all of the OS is built on Swift and Obj-C. There's going to be lots of C++ and C still floating around.

Thx, totally forgot retain cycles. Time to refresh my Swift skills..-

 

[ggibson913]

I think I will definitely hold off on upgrading until these issues get ironed out.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

To be honest, on my MacBookPro 2015 15 inch there are no memory leaks in Monterey so far. I guess I am lucky. ?

 

[Seanm87]

What ever happened to that Big Sur bug that wrote excessive data on hard drives? I assume they fixed it in the end.