Malcolm Owen
Complaints about memory leaks have started to surface following the release of macOS Monterey to the public, with users discovering unusually high amounts of memory being consumed by apps.
The release of a new operating system is typically accompanied by a period of teething issues, with users and developers discovering small issues that are later adjusted or fixed by Apple. On Monday, reports about memory leaks started to surface, specifically among Mac users who upgraded to macOS Monterey.
A memory leak is an issue when an application or a process falters and fails to release allocated memory properly. Over time, this could cause a service or an app to consume vast amounts of memory, reducing the resources available for use by others.
A number of complaints have been found on social media and the Apple Support forum, as initially reported by Macrumors, where users encounter the problem on their own Macs, running on macOS Monterey.
In the case of YouTube personality Tyler Stalman, he claims to repeatedly get warnings on his M1 Max-equipped MacBook Pro. The warning states he has "run out of application memory" with macOS advising to force quit memory-hogging applications, such as his 24GB instance of Final Cut Pro.
On Reddit, one user posted an Activity Monitor screenshot showing Control Center as occupying 9.19GB of memory, a macOS service that usually only consumes a few megabytes. A similar issue was noticed by Gregory McFadden on Twitter, with Control Center consuming over 26GB.
So glad I got 64GB of memory on my new Mac so I can use 26GB of it for control center... Wait... what. pic.twitter.com/inCOPaii1o
— Gregory McFadden (@GregoryMcFadden) October 28, 2021
Another from Twitter posted an image on October 27 with the same out-of-memory warning window, with Firefox using 79.20GB of memory.
Memory leaks are quite a common issue with macOS applications, such as reports surrounding macOS Catalina affecting virtualization tools in July 2020.
While an irritant for those affected, there are still only relatively few complaints about the memory leaks in macOS Monterey. The low number of reports about the issue points to it being quite rare for users to experience, rather than an epidemic affecting many users in a major way.
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13 Comments
“plague” and “small number of users” don’t really jibe.
At this point there may not be many Monterey users compared to others. Need to have a much bigger number of users to find out how big this issue is. I usually jump on phone iOS upgrades right away but wait a couple weeks or more for such a big macOS change. Will sit this one out for a while until there is more news or a fix issued.
listening to music in the Music app in lossless, after almost two hours I got a memory situation. When I looked, Music was using about 238 GB of memory using swap, and yes, that's GigaBytes. This is in a new 16" 64GB M1Max Macbook Pro. I haven't had a chance to try it again.
But it sounded amazing.
I'm guessing this is an M1(x)-based MacOS problem? Have two Intel-iMacs running Monterey since day one and haven't (yet) experienced this out-of-memory situation. I too use Final Cut Pro with huge projects, and various other memory-intensive apps with no problem.
Interesting to see how this develops.