macOS Monterey 12.1 still has memory leak issue

Maybe you should reboot into safe mode and see if your machine runs fine/fast.

If it does, then it's something you installed afterwards.

You can also try a fresh install of the OS, or install over your existing files.

I have only two nits with these m1 machines. The WiFi on the m1 max MBP is a fraction (like 1/3 or 1/4) the speed of an iPad right next to it. The other is this memory leak issue.

As far as performance, the m1 max MBP is blazing fast at everything. For me.

Since the problem manifests for different users in Mail, Firefox, and Final Cut Pro as well as in Safari, I don't think it's particularly tied to any one application. And since it's been reported on a range of hardware, both old and new, it's not a hardware problem. It's definitely a rare bug in the OS related to memory management, triggered by an exception in the applications.

Experience seems to be that it can be resolved by completely resetting the data of the application, which seems to change the behaviour of the applications enough to avoid however the exception was caused. For example, see my instructions for resolving it in Mail in this thread.

For Safari, I suspect that doing a similar thing will work. Try renaming ~/Library/Safari to ~/Library/SafariSave using the process described for Mail in that thread, then open Safari to see if it works.

JC

Tigerator wrote:

12.3.1 still has the issue. The Mail app has become unusable, making it impossible for me to work. This is not acceptable, a fix is needed quickly. As it is, I'll have to waste the time and pain of downgrading back to Catalina from Time Machine.

JC

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/32629da8-42e8-497c-8c3f-c18ded33b7e5

This is a user-to-user technical support forum, and the volunteers here do not have access to internal Apple information.

Suggest contacting Apple Support and/or going to developer.apple.com and filing a bug report.

Just to provide an update, after approaching Apple Support again with this issue, I was told to book an appointment at my local Apple store. I replicated the issue in front of one of their staffers, who admitted that Apple doesn't officially recognise this as a known problem at present. However, they said they would keep the MacBook for a few days to perform a complete wipe and reinstall of the OS and stress-test. I said I suspected it could be related to hardware (perhaps some production runs used different parts and that was the issue?) and was told a logic board replacement would be done if any issues were found.

Upon returning to the store a few days later, I was told that no issues had been found and no repair had taken place. As it was a complete wipe (the Mac needed reactivating and everything) I held onto the hope that this could potentially have fixed the issue, as I had installed OS 12 over OS 11.

No such luck. After a day of use the memory problems remain. I'm not even doing anything particularly stressful - just browsing webpages and the like - but it gets to the point (again) where my machine slows right down and I have to shut webpages or restart my Grammarly extension (the only extension I have installed!) in order to free up memory and get the machine working properly.

So, it looks like I'm out of options here. Apple doesn't seem to recognise this as an issue, and I can't swap to another machine as there aren't any other MacBook Air options that don't use the M1 chip.

I reverted to Big Sur, my mbp was unusable. Now everything works great. :D

Update to 12.2.

I thought I was the only one with the issue, even blamed Adobe for the memory leak coz I use Lightroom the most. I heard that today's 12.3 update fixed this issue. Hope it's true.

I have this issue too. I'm running a Macbook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM and it's constantly slowing down due to the OS being unable to control certain processes (usually websites / safari) from hogging too much RAM.

The issue has been present since I updated to MacOS 12, and is still there as of the latest update (12.2.1 (21D62))

It's driving me crazy. I've been in touch with Apple Support and have been sold that it's a known issue, but there's no timeline on when this will be fixed. Really regretting updating to 12 now.

There seem to be two complaints here, one is about a memory leak and the other about slow performance. I don't know that they are related.

The latest update has seemed to fix the memory leak issues I have been seeing. It is going to take days/weeks to be absolutely certain - a memory leak can be small in comparison to 16G of RAM so it can take a long time to run out.

A memory leak is when some piece of software, likely system software, is allocating memory that it never frees. Memory is allocated and freed constantly, it's a healthy thing. When it's not freed, the system thinks it's supposed to be allocated for good reason when it's not. The size of the allocated memory in system software tends to be small, like space to hold a string of characters. Application software can try to allocate huge sizes of memory, especially to hold an image or a video file (or a chunk of one).

If you think some app, like Final Cut Pro are leaking memory, simply close the app and see if the memory is not returned/freed. I wouldn't blame an app like that for using lots of memory while the application is in use.

The OS compresses memory when it's not in use. Like you have a chrome browser tab that you haven't looked at in a long time, it can be compressed to make more real memory for some other program(s) to use. When the system is truly out of real memory, it will start swapping memory from RAM to SSD. When a program isn't running, it's RAM can be copied to SSD and used for something else, and when the program is activated, the memory has to be read in from SSD (and something else written to make room).

If your machine is in constant out of memory mode, it will be constantly swapping, and that is going to make everything crawl. Nothing in the world worse than a machine that is swapping. When I set up a Linux workstation, I turn off swap altogether - if you run out of real memory, you need more memory :)

If your machine is simply sluggish all the time, even after a fresh boot with nothing running, then it's not a memory leak but something else wrong.

I have Docker Desktop installed on my system which uses a ~2GB linux virtual machine (qemu-system-aarch64). Otherwise, the memory usage by apps on my system (uptime 6+ days) looks really good.

Could be, make sure to send Apple feedback:

Product Feedback - Apple

@jessfromfl can you determine from the 'Force Quit Applications' window which app is the one using more than 50 Gb? If so there may be a workaround solution to get you past this.

JC

I have the Feedback Assistant App on my m1 iMac. I used it to report the issue. Something like this:

"I have the 8G m1 Mini as well. Both run out of memory after some time passes.

Running Monterey 12.2.1.

The Mini just serves iTunes and has no monitor on it. I do use it with Remote Desktop 24/7 on an external monitor on an old Intel iMac I still have.

It takes a couple or three weeks. Then the top bar on the desktop (on the Mini) disappears. I can't open any panel in settings. I can't even reboot the machine without a hard shutdown (hold power button until it shuts down) first.

The m1 iMac runs out of memory, too. It just takes longer."

---

People were reporting the memory leak problem last November. It really needs to be fixed. Some of us expect our systems to run 24/7/365.

I'm not sure about losing control of certain processes - seems to be a different issue, but could be related to out of memory.

When the computer runs out of real memory (too many open applications or browser tabs, etc.), it will offload some of the RAM used by an idle program (like a browser tab you haven't looked at in a while) to the SSD to make more real RAM. When you look at the tab that's on the SSD, it has to load from the SSD back into memory - often offloading some other program to the SSD to make space. If it gets into a constant switching between two of these programs (the programs can be system daemon programs, running in the background that we don't normally care about), you get into a continuous swapping state and everything will slow down.

Folks it may be my wishful thinking, but I just updated to 12.3 and after briefly testing and watching activity monitor, the memory leak COULD be fixed on my Intel Mac. Looks promising at this point.... fingers crossed.

I'm glad I found this thread and that I finally know that all these problems have to do with Monterey. I think it's the worst OS Apple ever has delivered, really buggy and from the different reports many people are affected. Apple should start to communicate much better on such issues instead of ignoring. I had several threads here on the Memory leak issue and nobody could help me (because there's no solution so far provided by Apple).

These were my threads:

iTunes Store / Music crashes Mac OS Monterey 12.1 and Mac Mini M1.

Apple Music cache might be the reason for crashes of my MacMini M1. Is there a solution?

MacMini M1 (2020) crashes/restarts regulary (Sleep mode issue?). Different problems from the beginning.

When I started again to search for the reason of the problems I finally found out through the app "iStat Menus" that there must be a problem with the memory consumption, especially when Music was active. My Mac just crashed some minutes ago as I connected my iPad. This time it might be something new. It's interesting, that after a restart the background of the user login window isn't the colourful background anymore, but a plain grey background.

If Apple can't solve the memory leak issues they will get serious problems. Actually my MacMini M1 isn't a computer I can rely on. For the reputation of the Silicon Chips this would be bad.

We are not, send feedback

https://www.apple.com/feedback/