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by craigc 1687 days ago
I too have the problem with WindowServer although for me it seems to happen with just regular usage. I have not rebooted in 48 days, and currently it is using 10GB RAM (I have a MacBook Air with 16GB). I have seen some people claim it has to do with using a display scaling setting other than the default (I use 1280x800).
1 comments
saagarjha 1686 days ago
How many windows do you have open? 10 GB of RAM is a very large amount for WindowServer to use.
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craigc 1686 days ago
Yes, I agree, but it is a memory leak. It doesn’t START at 10GB. Also closing windows does not help much at all.

To answer your question, I have a total of 73 windows open at the moment. 11 of them are from applications with a single window open, 8 are from iTerm, and 54 are from Sublime Text. I am aware that is quite a lot for Sublime, but that is just how I use it.

Regardless, I just quit Sublime Text, and the memory usage only dropped to 8.9GB still absurdly high for having 19 windows open.

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frupert52 1686 days ago
I have been seeing all of the above problems on my 16GB M1 MacBook Air for probably at least 6 months now.

WindowServer has consistently been the main culprit but occasionally other apps like to chip in where they can too. Often that means there isn’t one single process which I can kill to reclaim enough memory to continue working without being promoted again or having MacOS forcibly close all my applications on me. As a result, reboots appear to be the only real solution for me.

Interestingly though, in the past few weeks I have been working with similar numbers of open Sublime Text windows as yourself and I can confirm that since then, ST4 has been a regular and serious offender when it comes to memory usage in Activity Monitor.

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saagarjha 1686 days ago
Yes, it is. Can you try running this and seeing what it reports: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29147886?
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craigc 1686 days ago
Thanks. Output is here if you have any ideas.

https://gist.github.com/ccampbell/9a0118b0e3e607ec56a3a2cc59...

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saagarjha 1684 days ago
Hmm, that is interesting. You have lots of unaccounted for memory, which is not normal at all. Would you happen to have the full footprint output? Trying to see how the 200K individual VM_ALLOCATE regions are distributed in side.
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