macOS Monterey 12.1 still has memory leak issue

Ok i've done extensive research on this and spoke to a range of clients / others with similar iMac's or "Older" macs pre 2020.  I've talked to top Apple support engineers which are not giving much up about it.

What I have found is they have all reported a massive slow down and issues with rebooting, can't boot etc etc. My macbook pro is OK, but still terribly slow for it's specs. All the iMacs 2020 and below are almost unusable.

My iMac can boot into Windows and is very quick using a dual boot also. Loading an old version of OSX also works perfectly fine. 

I've spent 1000s on various external thunderbolt drives to solve. It appears that Apple is slowing down these machines on purpose, which I hope is not the case.

I'll await the 12.3 update before I get rid of these machines and move to windows.. no no no.. please don't make me do that. 

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.

Yeah safe mode makes no difference. I've uninstalled anything "New" and removed all launch agents. Clean my mac can't find anything also.

I fix Apple's for clients and for a living and can say that this issue has come up a lot.

This happens on a Samsung T5, T7 and M2 Pro drive. Blazing speeds. I can boot up on a m series mac with no issues whatsoever with the same thunderbolt drive.

I'm talking pre M1 machines. Anything M series seems ok.

I agree. But it’s actually made it semi useable. It wasn’t on there previous to it.

I manage a lot of studios with multiple Mac’s all the older ones are struggling.

Anything’s that's not M1 is pointless using at this point.

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.

Universal Control is half baked AT BEST. Still shows beta, which is a generous moniker. In the spirit of being honest, Apple has absolutely had their *** kicked trying to deploy this feature. Up to this point, it's a failure. Just keeping it real. What a disappointment

Let me thank you for during an "erase and install". Had been wondering if that would fix the issue. But, it's a lot of work and to end up with the same issue, I know is very frustrating. Again, thanks for eliminating the clean install possibility.

No problem! I wanted to make sure that it couldn't be an issue with the update going over the top of MacOS 11. It seems now it's almost certainly related to how MacOS 12 controls memory. The only other (outside) chance is that it's a hardware issue... I do find it puzzling that this isn't impacting all M1 Air users.

When you see http:// in the process name, it means some WWW site you are looking at. Browsers are notorious for using lots of memory. If you can find your http://mail.google.com tab, for example, close it and watch your memory come back.

I have no idea what www.pushsquare.com is but close that tab, too.

The longer you have a tab open, the more memory it can use over time.

That you are using 3.52GB of swap suggests your machine might be slow because it's constantly reading and writing to the SSD

Closing the apps / tabs which are using a lot of memory always speeds up my machine. I also didn't have this problem before upgrading to MacOS 12.

Push Square is one of the sites I co-own, so I need to have that open a lot. Likewise with Google mail and Grammarly, two things I use on a daily basis.

I get what you're saying - close the problem down and it frees up memory - but I need to visit these sites and use these apps, so that's not a proper solution.

This is a computer I paid a lot of money for around 12 months ago, so the fact it cannot deal with having a few web pages open is crazy.

You don't wanna even attempt to manage or disable "swap". That is the job of the OS. What is happening is a systemic mismanagement of RAM resources. If you intervene with the process you will only add to your problems. I have never seen activity monitor with entries like Monterey has. My 2017 iMac with 16GB of RAM has been through (6) MacOS releases.

I'm not seeing the memory leaks anymore. I had a system just sitting there doing absolutely nothing. 8G m1 mini. It would eventually run out of memory and the OOM killer in the kernel would kill finder itself. Nothing but a hard reset worked to get the system back working.

After the latest 1 or 2 updates, the machine is running for several weeks without any memory issues.

Applications use memory. Some are memory intensive, even. Music app, for example, might be loading the images for all the songs and playlists and albums and artists so as you browse and return to a view you've. seen, it's fast.

If you are truly having memory leak issues, closing the app using the memory will free up all the memory it was using. If there's a true memory leak in the OS, it will eventually run out of RAM and swap space and basically halt.

The problem remains after closing the music app (which can't be closed easily). Then it starts that other apps complain about running out of memory. At the same time the machine isn't very responsive anymore, sometimes it freezes, sometimes the mouse and keyboard don't react. I've gone through many threads in other forums and there are lots of people with the same problems since updating on Mojave. Some had it with the last version of BigSur. So it must be the memory leak.

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.