Monterey; Pages Memory Leak?

Since downloading Monterey I receive repeated messages "your system has run out of application memory". This is only occurred since downloading Monterey. When examining activity monitor pages seems to be the main culprit using up 18 GB and more! Is this evidence of a memory leak for Pages with Monterey os? Restart makes no difference.




iMac 24″, macOS 12.0

Posted on Oct 31, 2021 12:15 PM

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Posted on Nov 3, 2021 9:17 AM

"If you made changes to customize your mouse pointer and specifically the color choice—restore the defaults and compare your results."

@leroydouglas nailed it here for my scenario. I had modified the pointer color in accessibility settings. Once reset, the memory leak has stopped.


note: I was able to keep the existing larger sized cursor

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Nov 3, 2021 9:17 AM in response to leroydouglas

"If you made changes to customize your mouse pointer and specifically the color choice—restore the defaults and compare your results."

@leroydouglas nailed it here for my scenario. I had modified the pointer color in accessibility settings. Once reset, the memory leak has stopped.


note: I was able to keep the existing larger sized cursor

Nov 6, 2021 6:55 AM in response to samumon

You 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.  

Nov 3, 2021 8:08 AM in response to Rimmo

Rimmo wrote:

Is this evidence of a memory leak for Pages with Monterey os? Restart makes no difference.
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/2a9f0efd-f736-4367-a0cc-d9136893b6ee



There were some known issues with memory leaks in other applications mentioned..


in the macOS Monterey—


If you made changes to customize your mouse pointer and specifically the color choice—restore the defaults and compare your results.


Change Pointer preferences for accessibility on Mac - Apple ...


Nov 4, 2021 8:07 AM in response to Rimmo

Doing the pointer reset did not help me.


Apple will have to fix this in an update. But.... If you open Activity Monitor in an unused desktop, you can keep an eye on it. if you see a process or an app stealing too much RAM, you can force quit it and it will go back to its normal thing.


Its temporary, but its quite easy to deal with. FYI if WindowServer process is doing it, when you force quit it, your screen will go black for about 5 seconds while Monterey puts it all back, and then you will have to sign back in.

Nov 6, 2021 6:36 AM in response to Rimmo

To answer the original question:

As you see, universalaccessd is using way too much memory; it should be around 7-8Mb. The process is related to Accessibility (formerly Universal Access) settings.


For couple of days I’ve been trying different setups mainly with Accessibility settings, and can’t be sure about it but my best guess is that it is not just the mouse pointer colour which triggers the memory leak problem. There must be certain other settings too, perhaps not related to Accessibility. People have had Control Center too chewing way too much memory, so could there be certain options there which also causes the problem to trigger?

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Monterey; Pages Memory Leak?

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