Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak

I manage approx 100 of these, and the issue that I have had is migrating directly from intel model to m1. approx 20 percent had issues. My resolve that worked was a clean profile and manually moving the data files to the new profile and deleting the previous.

Yes, mine does that same. Some website, 20 minutes in on simple article will shoot up from a few hundred megabytes to close to 8gbs for a Macworld article! Then I get a notification within Safari about that page using "significant" resources for something so simple- a little article. Crazy. The Apple people even saw it. If the M1 is supposed to be so amazing, how come it can't have a simple website stay open, only 1 tab, without this memory issue? Its crazy. I have a m1 air with 16gbs of ram and 1tb. Apple told me basically told me I need to upgrade to monterey or FU; I told them I refuse and that its taken them a year to even get Big Sur right and they are creating shoddy operating systems. They didn't really like that. I told them i don't need any of the useless iOS iPhone features on the new OS and was happy with Big Sur (prior I had Catalina and was very happy with that OS).

I am wit you buddy!

I noticed the same issue with MacBook Pro 14 M1 Pro 16G Monterey 12.1, memory pressure is always high compare with previous MacBook Pro 13 with the same workload and apps opened. It slow down my Macbook and sometime I need to close apps and reopen it.

I just posted more details below

Clean profile simply create a new account and manually move the data to it in a nutshell.

this has worked for me every time so far, and I hope it continues. my best guess is it is a software issue and it is not migrating the settings properly from a intel to m1 via migration assistant.

Thanks. I am not sure what you mean by 'user data'. Are you moving the user folder as is into the 'migration' folder?

Also, does this mean you do not need to re-install all applications but only 'move' them back to the newly created user account?

Just an FYI, there is something fishy with that synonyme.woxikon.de site. It looks like it's a simple text search, but it was using 600MB+ and a ton of CPU on my windows machine too. It's likely some kind of hidden JS, I wouldn't be surprised if it's hijacking your browser to do something shady like mine crypto or like you mentioned, it contains ads & they might be abusing JS somehow. There were a bunch of obfuscated source entries too when I inspected it with Chrome Dev tools. I closed it immediately. I would not recommend using that site.

I also share the same situation. I have an Macbook Air M1 8GB that worked perfectly when I bought it (Jan 2020), running the Big Sur. After I upgraded to Monterey (now version 12.1), the slowness and memory leaks are hapenning every day. I just opened the Mac, with Notes, Chrome (1 tab - this one I am writing right now), Slack, VS Code (in background, no projects running), WhatsApp desktop, Apple settings (updting to 12.2), and this is what the Monitor shows me: the memory is already full. I work with software development and I need much more than this apps to work the whole day. The Mac M1 was once the solution but it is now getting worse. I'm pretty sure this is a software issue, as I didn't have this problems with the BigSur version.

I did what he said and I did a fresh instal of the latest Big Sur and I will say, I did notice an improvement. But to transfer all the photos and videos, I’ll have to take some time to remove duplicate photos and videos. Website seems to behave better.

I've had exactly the same problem and I'm just learning this is a flaw in their new M1 chip. I ordered a shiny new 24 inch iMac with 16 gig memory and set it up end it was barely functional from the get-go. Tech-support had me run first aid, reinstall the operating system, and still the problem persisted. One tech rep admitted this has been a common problem, then tried to convince me it was normal because "well you know, out of 16 gig, the OS itself uses four". I feel I have been sold a bill of goods and Apple is disingenuous and not telling people about this. Granted, if they did their stock prices would start to plummet. Maybe they should. Multiple tech-support calls several days later, I sent the computer back for a replacement. Now I am thinking I should just cancel it all together and shop elsewhere. If anyone has found a fix, I would love to hear it. Apple is not helpful.

Just updating, I noticed some improvement after I updated the OS from Monterey 12.1 to 12.2. It's still not perfect, with high memory usage, but it's much better, with no leaks so far. It keeps around 7GB, in the yellow range, almost the whole day.

I have a m1 MacBook Air that I got in November 2021. I complete agree with your comments about Apple's lack of care/concern or consideration of this GLARING issue! People are paying way to much money to work on a computer that has memory leak issue that harken you back to 2004! I will say, after completely restoring and manually moving all my files over as suggested, it did work for a while. My problem with the ram issues are website loaded on Safari. I have always used Safari, it has always been my main and only browser. Not anymore. I was reading a simple article and it said that the website (only one of two tabs) was using significant resources. Well, I opened up activity monitor and it was close to 6gbs of my ram used for it! Crazy! I nearly lost it but I tried that same website and like six others on FireFox (Apple Silicate one) and it was like 900mbs for like 7 websites, which sounds normal to me! So it seems the M1 issue is connected to Safari Browser to me. What about you guys? This is why I use my Dell laptop for work stuff, I don't have time for this non-sense. I have 16gbs of ram, 1tb hd, MacBook Air and Apple told me, "Sorry we cannot help you unless you upgrade to Monteray! They need to fix M1, Safari, and Big Sur before I would even consider it. Window 10 doesn't seem bad at all after this experience. It will definitely be my last Mac. I would rather use Linux instead of a Mac..For work I use Windows 10 Pro on my Dell. Works amazing. No issues. 16gbs of RAM with a 11th Gen i3.

I have narrowed this very real issue to Safari 15.x.

I have 64GB of RAM and memory goes to <500MB when running six open tabs and after refreshing the open tabs multiple times!

Shutting down Safari returns most of the memory to the pool.

Running Chrome with the same tabs does not consume memory to this degree and there's no leak I can see.

I saw the memory leak on a base model m1 mini. Just sitting there, running nothing but istats menus, it would run out of memory (8GB) after a couple of weeks.

The latest OS updates have fixed the leaks. The mini has been running for over a month, no problem. Now I’m willing to use it.

As you use a *nix type OS, it caches more and more of what it reads and writes to the SSD. Like the first time you do “ls” from the command line is way slower than the 2nd (and 3rd, etc) since the SSD access is slower than RAM access. Apple’s OS is smart in that it will compress less accessed memory to make more real RAM available. Decompression is faster than SSD access, too!

My m1 max MBP constantly runs with about 32GB used, and I haven’t rebooted it in recent memory. I use it to develop software, specifically I use VS Code to edit and run over a dozen back end microservices (in Docker) and have both Safari and Chrome open with dozens of tabs open.

I would not consider a reboot unless all 64G were used and swap (on SSD) filling up. I haven’t seen that situation, though.

I had a 2014 MacBook Pro w/8gbs of ram prior. Never had any "Memory Leak" issues ever before. I never even heard of that term. Now, I have a M1 MacBook Air and I hate it. I hate the keyboard and I hate all the memory issues I have been experiencing. It is nuts, for sure! I have the m1 Air w/16gbs of ram and 1tb of HD. I can't have but 2 tabs opened or so without it giving me a message about the memory leak issues. YouTubers went on and on about the M1 Processor. Yet, the RAM is the major issue and Apple refuses to help me unless I upgrade to Monterey, which, according to my research, is still having the same memory leak issues with the M processors that Big Sur is having. So upset! $1,700 for crap and my $500.00 Dell laptop with a i3 blows this thing out of the water with ram use. Beside that and the horribly crappy keyboard, its nice. What's odd, is that one of my clients just got a new m1 MBA and the keyboard is nicer and its the same model as mine, but not customed made like mine. I am not happy. Unless they really listen to their computers and fix this issue for current and future M processor users, I will not be getting any Mac computer again.