Monterey Memory Leak

Workaround, until this bug is fixed: If you get this problem with Mail, as I did, rather than Firefox or other apps, then you can work around it by forcing Mail to rebuild its database.

If you use Mail in the usual way, with IMAP servers such as iCloud, Google, Microsoft, etc., then it's easy to do that:

From the Finder's desktop, choose Go -> Library to open your library folder.

1. In that folder, rename the folder "Mail" to "MailSave", just in case. This saves the entire state of your email.
2. Close the library folder window.
3. Start up the Mail app. It will automatically rebuild a new Mail folder in your library, and download all of your email from the IMAP servers. (This may take some time, so leave Mail running for a while.)
4. If (and only if) you are one of those power users who makes special email folders on your Mac, then in the Mail app, choose File -> Import Mailboxes, and navigate to Library/MailSave to find the .mbox file of the special folder and import it into your new Mail folder.

That's it. Carry on as usual. You will have to check your Preferences in Mail and re-create any rules or other customizations you may have done, but otherwise, all should be well and you should be back to normal without the memory crashes.

JC

Of course it's not normal, it's a Monterey OS bug that has manifested in several different applications, including Final Cut, Music and Firefox as well as Mail. Apple's aware of it, I just wish they would finally fix it. Others have tried Etrecheck, and nothing new was learned.

JC

Yes gents, you are right, I should be reporting and assisting rather than ranting about this frustrating problem. Sorry for the unhelpful rant. Just so you know, I'm collecting and packaging a runnable snapshot to reproduce it (I've already submitted a dump and trace). From the trace, it looks a lot like the problem is a cascading sequence of page faults starting with a single one. A possible cause of this behaviour is a page fault in the page fault handler/reporter. MacOS had one of these before, some years ago, but that one was more common and easier to reproduce.

Apologies again.

JC