Why does distnoted hog so much memory and then get stuck?

BashfulMonkeySpider wrote:

Distnoted sometimes takes gigs of real, virtual and private memory, then won't release it. Only way to fix is to kill the process. This has persisted across multiple OS versions and computers at least since 2016. Why does a daemon for notifications ever need so much memory? And why can't Apple fix this?

I see you are running 11.6

Distnoted (a system daemon) which provides distributed notification services

and persisted "This has persisted across multiple OS versions and computers at least since 2016."

I would recommend —Call Customer Support (800) MY–APPLE (800–692–7753)

or on line https://getsupport.apple.com/

or call AppleCare Support at 1-800-APLCARE (800-275-2273)

Outside the USA—Contact Apple for support and service by phone

See a list of Apple phone numbers around the world.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201232

Daemons and Services Programming Guide - Apple Developer

You can file a bug report using this same link: http://www.apple.com/feedback

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.  

Hmmmmm.