Apple Monterey Memory Leak Traced to ...

[Obsidian Dragon]

I read this the other day and just wanted to relay it here in case it helps anybody with the memory leak issue in Monterey.

https://fossbytes.com/macos-monterey...-leak-bug-fix/

[Darryl Ramm]

And while it may be a culprit, folks were pointing out it's clearly not the only issue. e.g. https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/15/monte...ion-suggestion

Will be great to hear if disabling the custom cursor fixes issues for Pro Tools users.

[JFreak]

I finally found the culprit. It is the process called SafariBookmarksSyncAgent which respawns after force quit and seems to appear even if you do not have Safari syncing to iCloud enabled.

Workaround: boot your computer before opening PT session and keep your Activity Monitor open. When it starts to eat memory, force quit it and it stays calm for a while.

Today my tests showed that in 10 hours that process had read 10 gigabytes of bookmarks and written 20 gigabytes of the same stuff. Go figure. Bookmarks file is kilobytes. So it is doing read/write all the time.

This is a workaround and not a final solution, mind you. I am trying to find out what else gets broken if that thing is permanently disabled from UNIX side of things.

Darryl, are you interested already?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Darryl, are you interested already?

Always interested. Especially in trying to understand Finnish humor.

Does bring back memories of past pathological behavior with mdworker indexing drives. I've had to disable indexing/kill those processes because of them thrashing. Maybe Apple could be doing a better job here of detecting aberrant service processes. Do you see any helpful warning in the Console logs?

[JFreak]

So far nothing useful in system.log but I am keeping an eye on it. The process has staid <10MB now, but once it starts leaking there should be something.