Pages (v14.4) Leaking Memory Under Tahoe 26 (0, 1, and 2)

Question

Pages (v14.4) Leaking Memory Under Tahoe 26 (0, 1, and 2)

Pages has some sort of memory leak when running on my MacBookAir under Tahoe 26.2.

I have Pages (v14.4) open with a single text-only document (about 20 pages long) loaded and observe memory utilization in Activity Monitor.

It starts in the 275MB range, then with no known activity occurring, I can watch as every 3-4 seconds, Pages consumes an additional 200-300KB (.2-.3GB) of RAM.

If I lock the screen and come check the next day, then it will have ballooned from 275MB to about 2.3GB.

Note nothing of the sort happened under Sequoia nor on my Intel i5 Sequoia iMac desktop.

MacBook Air (M2, 2023)

Posted on Jan 13, 2026 7:15 AM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,428 points

Jan 13, 2026 8:05 AM in response to gracelessAtom

Pages v14.4 was released during the lifecycle of Sequoia. As it is now going on 9 months since Pages v14.4 was last updated, it still lacks the Apple revisions that would make it fully compatible with Tahoe, and that may or may not explain why you think you have a memory leak. You can send the Pages product team feedback from the application's menu, or do nothing. Both will have the same result.

If you leave your Mac on for multiple days without rebooting, or leave Pages open all of that time, there are other contributing factors to lost memory than Pages. I recommend that you do as I do, and shut the Mac down daily for periods of no utiliization such as overnight. That gives you the benefit of freeing up System and application caches on a regular basis.

I run Pages v14.4 on Tahoe 26.2 on my 64 GB M4 Mac Mini Pro and I see no evidence of a Pages memory leak. Even with 200 page documents.

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

123,428 points

Jan 13, 2026 2:13 PM in response to gracelessAtom

Since others have reported so-called Pages memory leaks, I have opened various Pages documents and page sizes in Pages v14.4 on Tahoe 26.0 - 2. I observed nothing out of the ordinary for various sized Pages documents when viewed in Activity Monitor. Certainly nothing reported by others.

The only 8GB Mac that I have ever purchased was a refurbished 2020 Core i7 iMac. My first defiant act was to additionally install 32 GB RAM into it. Tahoe is more demanding of System resources than Sequoia ( a typical Apple progression), and a Mac with 8GB may be borderline under-configured since the operating system will absorb nearly half of your available RAM.

Tahoe 26.2 is neither a complete bug fix version or even a performance update as those will continue to appear in later versions. Pages has never been updated expressly for compatibility with Tahoe either. I would revisit this when Tahoe 26.3 and a new update to Pages becomes available. Not much you can do now. I doubt that a reinstallation of Tahoe 26.* would make any difference, though you never know… Wait for 26.3 before you do that.

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Answer 3

Jan 13, 2026 10:12 AM in response to VikingOSX

Viking OSX - thank you for the reply.

Have you looked at the memory utilization of Pages in Activity Monitor? Your system with 64GB could absorb a lot more leak if there is one without it being noticed as a user. My M2 8GB system shows it a lot earlier, but as mentioned earlier, under Sequoia or on my Intel i5 iMAC desktop also with 8GB, this doesn't occur.

I did a rebuild of my corespotlight search index that made things a whole lot better, but this Pages memory bloat persists. Would like to avoid a macOS reinstall but that may be needed.

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