MacBook Air memory leaks following the Sonoma Update

I have had memory leaks on Apple Mail since upgrading to Ventura. The same continues with Sonoma. If I open Apple mail, then within five minutes I get the memory overload warning and have to force quit Apple Mail. I have spent MANY hours online and on the phone with "senior" Apple support and no solution. They confirmed TANGIBLE, REPRODUCIBLE, AND REPEATABLE evidence of the problem. But no solution.

One of the senior Apple techs just suggested using the Gmail web app. Wow.

I'm also seeing MAJOR memory leak with Sonoma, major one being "WindowServer".

The conclusion of the many tests I've done the last couple days to track this down (because it annoyed me so much) is that it is linked to external monitors.

MacOS freshly rebooted not connected to an external monitors does not exhibit such issue.

Then I connect my external monitor (Dell UltraSharp 32 6K Monitor - U3224KA - native res i.e. no scaling), do not start anything (especially the buggy DDPM Dell tool), leave it doing nothing over 1 full night and 1 full day and WindowServer process is showing up around 9GB (coming from less than 1GB before when no external monitor was connected).

Because I have the M3 Max with 128Gb, I noticed this when, with my traditional workflow, all my memory tools showed me that the system was using swap, was compressing memory already, and memory pressure was constantly increasing.

Over 1 or 2 weeks (or even less) WindowServer was easily consuming a whopping 200GB!

App Memory was showing that almost all my RAM was consumed despite no other process than WindowServer was showing abnormal amounts of RAM usage.

This is driving me crazy.

Apple Mail App on Sonoma has a memory leak on both my MacBook Air 2023 and Studio 2022. Consumes >32 GB over 10's of minutes, continues growing until system memory is full and receive system warning. Have to attempt to quit app, or force quit, to recover. Happens after restart.

System and App software installations are rather vanilla - no secondary extensions/mods. Apps are all approved for Sonoma.

I have a new MB M3 w/ 36GB of memory, running 14.1.1 and I'm getting the "out of memory force close" pop-up. Stating I only have 5GB remaining, after force closing everything reported I only have 7GB remaining. I had a similar issue on my MB M2 w/ 16GB prior to trading it in. I've also experienced it on my Air M2. The common denominator is Sonoma.

Good news here: just updated to MacOS 14.4 and so far so good.

Looks a lot better.

Will report here if the issue still happens over time but initial tests do not exhibit the memory leak when playing some full screen videos on external monitor whereas it was immediately occurring with 14.3.1.

Apparently it took Apple 4 versions at least to fix it, which is unbelievable if you ask me!

I am experiencing this same issue.

Im running Sonoma 14.5 on an M2 Pro MacBook Pro and have my lid closed while connected to two external Dell U3219Qs.

After maybe 10 minutes of work the system is using swapped memory and the machine is unusable. However without the monitors and the lid open, this issue doesn't arise.

Did you contact Apple to let them know? They won't know unless you do that.

Contact Apple

It is one thing to say there is a Memory Leak in Sonoma 14.0

It is an another thing to provide Tangible, Reproducible and Repeatable evidence to support this assertion.

Would suggest making a Bug Report to Apple as there may or may not be time before the 14.1 Beta is finalized

FYI - on 3 different Apple M1 / M2 Personal Computers - no Memory Leaks I can find, so far

matherman wrote:

I have a pretty new mac 2023 MacBook pro with m3max chip and 36gb of memory, I've been noticing with about 10 safari tabs open and iMessages it will start swapping after running for a day or so. Reboot and it's back to using about 12gb of memory. There is definitely something off, that needs to be fixed.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/35876691-ae1f-4b34-8b84-fc99f7016613

There is nothing abnormal in the image you showed.

By design, macOS will try to use as much memory as is available. Unused memory serves no purpose. Keeping cached files, or compressing memory of currently not in use applications, is what the OS does. A small portion of swap space is ok. (Of course it would not be ok to have several GB of swap). A very useful indicatio is that memory pressure: low and green is good.

fred-nbs wrote:

True in most occasions.

But there is definitively something abnormal with the handling of external monitors.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/3d65734f-c061-4a0a-9421-9a060fad173d

50+GB for WindowServer process it keeps growing to the point where my 128GB RAM M3Max it getting slower, use more & more compressed memory and swaps.

Only a reboot cures it.

This does not happen when working not connected to an external monitor.

I agree, this is not normal.

I wonder if this problem is somehow related to a problem some users have with Quicktime Player with external displays.

What cables/adapters are you using to connect the display? There appears to be a problem with Apple's own multiport AV adapter.

FWIW, I work with an external display all day long, using a third party USB-C dock with HDMI port, or a direct USB-C to HDMI or HDMI to VGA adapter, depending (I teach on a lot of different rooms with different hardware). I have never had this Window Server gobbling up memory problem, in any version of macOS. Running 14.3.1 now.

Most likely caused by software installed that is not 100% Sonoma compatible.

Yeah my machine has 8gb of ram and one or two low resource apps running ive got less than 300mb free.

Exactly the same here on Macbook Air M1 came with the latest update macOS Sonoma 14.3 after 26/01/2024:

Symptoms: idle Macbook Air prompts "out of memory force close" pop-up, then it Freezes Completely. Only hard reset helps. Happened twice in the last days.

I have a pretty new mac 2023 MacBook pro with m3max chip and 36gb of memory, I've been noticing with about 10 safari tabs open and iMessages it will start swapping after running for a day or so. Reboot and it's back to using about 12gb of memory. There is definitely something off, that needs to be fixed.