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WindowServer taking unholy amount of RAM in 10.13

M

Morgon

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 21, 2014
46
114
Since upgrading to High Sierra, I've noted WindowServer has become quite the RAM hog on my 15-inch, Mid-2014 rMBP.

Performance is currently okay, but I'm wondering how high this will go. It's also interesting that I am only using 13 GB RAM, but 4 specifically in Swap (give us 32GB machines already, Apple!). It's been running (with some migrations between home and work, where I have two DisplayPort monitors) for about 2 days, 10 hours according to 'uptime'.

Anyone experiencing the same?
 

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I am. Currently at 16h of uptime since the last reboot and windowServer is at ~3GB, but I've seen it going way further up in the past few days. It goes up a bit every few moments and it pretty much never frees up any memory: the only way to revert it back to "normal" memory consumption is restarting the process, but it always starts to climb up again shortly after.

The machine is a 15-inch mid 2015 rMBP, no external monitor (I use a slightly bigger resolution than default, but I can reproduce the issue even with the regular one).
 
I am seeing quite the opposite. My system has been running High Sierra since Monday and WindowServer is only using 126 MB. Also, I do not think I have seen my Memory Used go beyond 7 GB and the system seem’s to be actively freeing up memory.
 
I have reported the problem here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/32287449?ac_cid=op123456#32287449, no conclusion yet.

A bit of googling shows similar problems with previous OSX.

Some guesses:
1. Safari ? Some people say using Firefox kind of mitigating the problem, haven't tried.
2. External monitor related?

Currently my way to work around this is logging out when WindowServer takes up too much RAM, select "reopen windows". Not ideal, but you don't have to reboot at least.
 
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I've seen it reported also here and here.

About those guesses:
1. I mainly use Firefox, and I didn't notice any difference between this and Safari regarding the leak (it slowly but surely shows up even with no browser opened in my testing).
2. I have never connected the machine to an external monitor since updating to 10.13.

The only thing these machines seems to have in common is the Retina Display: could the issue be associated with it someway?
 
Glad to see my guesses are not true.

There used to be a WindowServer.log file generated in older OSX, but I haven't found it in 10.13.

It would be nice if some developer from Apple can take a look at this. Nobody in Apple see this problem? Kind of ridiculous.
 
Thanks for raising this, I didn't noticed until I checked. I am seeing the same issue.

Memory usage is high when connected to a 4K display, or just using the internal display.
 
Honestly we don't even know if that is the problem. It could be anything. Driver error, poorly coded application, metal api error. Problems happen. The best thing to do would be to dump the memory and send to apple. All... several gb of it. :)
 
According to some google results, there used to be a windowserver.log, but no longer to be found in HS. If that can be turned on, it might help find the root cause of the problem.
 
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SimonTheSoundMa said:
Please include the column 'real memory', and take memory column with a pinch of salt.
Click to expand...
The column is certainly there, look at the screenshot. In my recent reboot, I'm now at 2 GB RealMem (as it hasn't had to compress it yet, it still shouldn't take this amount).
 
prisstratton said:
I am seeing quite the opposite. My system has been running High Sierra since Monday and WindowServer is only using 126 MB. Also, I do not think I have seen my Memory Used go beyond 7 GB and the system seem’s to be actively freeing up memory.
Click to expand...
Just out of curiosity, did you 'upgrade' your system, or did you use a fresh install of HS?
 
I used an in-place upgrade as opposed to a clean install.

I was debating the necessity of doing a clean install as I ran the beta on a separate partition (so a clean install, which ran perfect for me), but I thought I would wait and see how things performed before I decided if that was necessary.

But, things have been totally awesome for me. Sorry that some of you are having issues.

Edit: Just checked and WindowServer is still sitting at 126 MB.
 
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I just tried to upgrade an old (non-Metal) mid 2010 MBP, and there's no leak whatsoever. I'm thinking more and more that the issue is indeed in the brand new Metal "mode" for the window server.
Can anyone confirm? Are all the affected machines Metal capable and viceversa?
 
People should write their hardware as well so we know if it's a AMD/Nvidia/Intel issue or not.

I have a MacBook Pro 13" 2015 Retina with Intel 6100 graphics. My window server is currently using 188MB of RAM and I haven't noticed any issues since upgrading. The whole GUI is much smoother after I installed High Sierra.
 
I just noticed with my late 2013 rMBP, using Safari to play a video can make windowserver memory go up much quicker than normal browsing.
 
Do you use expose a lot?
Full Screen mode?

any external displays?

my WindowServer is stuck at 275 MB-- and I have two displays, one of them 5K, and 24 GB.

It's a bug, alright. But I can't replicate it. Can you?
 
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