Macbook M1 Pro 2021 memory leak

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.

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.

Hey,

I have the same problem and 12.1 didn't fix it.

Webpages on Safari 15.2 consume between 150 up 950MB, roughly 400mb on average. A lot of programs use a lot of memory. E.g. Dropbox 800mb (I am aware that this could be a dropbox-specific problem)

I am not using any special mouse cursor-size, no safari-extensions.

My MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro 16GB gets slow and does not respond very well when using a couple of tabs and e.g. pixelmator. Of course that is really the opposite of what I wanted when I switched from a Mac Pro 13" 2018.

Best regards.

Hi DaSteinhoff,

Apologies for the delayed reply, and thanks very much for coming back to me and sharing screenshots - this is really helpful.

From what I can see in activity monitor the overall system memory is in yellow which means you're not far off running out of it. When the system memory is close to running out, the Mac could start to feel slow and unresponsive. From activity monitor there's no memory leaks occurring in the applications you've got running - Microsoft Teams is generally a memory hog, but there's nothing from there that looks like it's using excessive amounts of memory.

To me, it looks like you're free of memory leaks and the slowdown you're experiencing is just due to how much you've got open and running.

I hope this helps, but feel free to come back to me if you've any questions or concerns.

Best Regards,

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'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.

I am running 12.2.1 on a new MBP 16", M1 Max, 64GB. I consistently see memory slowly ratchet up, and only a reboot seems to fix. This exact same thing happened with a MBP 14", M1 Max, 64 GB I was using for a few months before I received this machine a week or so ago.

Could someone please answer this man?

My brother, friends and myself have the same issue.

Just out of curiosity, did you get a customized MacBook Pro or one of the "standard" models? Yours looks like the model in the middle, right? So of the shelve.. I had the hopes that maybe only customized MacBooks were affected :(

I hope, this finds a solution soon, as me and friends of mine who are actually depending on this machine economically would love to use these machines.

Thanks for sharing an update john_doe1106 ~ Glad to hear things are working well for you! I've also updated to MacOS 12.1 and so far no leaks from my side with the applications I use.

Keep us posted @tyronne98 on how you get on!

Hi Ana,

this is what the cpu-times and ram-usage diagram shows just around when Pixelmator got a little sluggish today. Not too bad but not responding to clicks few times.

A lot of safari-pages have a pretty high memory footprint. E.g. "synonyme.woxikon.de" while I did not use that page within the last hour or so. Same goes for "sessionlab.com"

Best regards

Hi,

thank you for quick reply. I strongly disagree: each of the safaris tabs accumulate memory over time. It is ridiculous that a page I like synonyme.woxikon.de takes more than 600mb of ram: it is a text-only, maybe three pages-high site.

i should not and never had high memory pressure on any other mac / macOS with only safari and two “bigger” (teams!, pixelmator) Programms running.

best

Daniel

Hi Daniel,

Sorry you feel that way. If you're unhappy with the performance of your machine and want to share your feedback with Apple about it, here's the link: https://www.apple.com/feedback/

Alternatively, Apple support can be contacted here if you'd like technical help and troubleshooting.

All the best.

Someone is hungry. Haven't opened the page since a day and it is getting bigger. It wants my attention. Just remember: its text only but 2-3 ads are showing up. A lot of links (50-100) to other articles on the same domain. Maybe safari is auto-crawling all these links and preloading the pages? That would be bad.

Will try to default to light mode these days. Thank you @tyronne.

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!