Easiest Way (Possibly) to Fix Memory Leak Error on MacOS Monterey
Have you noticed your Mac slows down after upgrading to macOS 12 Monterey ? You are not alone. A lot of people have reported seemingly random slowdowns and extremely high RAM usage in various applications – even those that don’t require a lot of RAM, like Tweetbot, consume a lot of memory. If this error lowers your productivity, a non-standard mouse pointer may be the cause.
The memory leak bug appears to affect both Apple Silicon and Intel-based Macs. Some people report that innocuous processes like WindowServer use up to 24GB of RAM, indicating the severity of the problem. Memory leaks have been reported in other processes and applications as well, such as Control Center, Mail, Firefox, etc. This is often followed by an ominous message: “Your system is out of application memory.”
With Monterey, you can change the fill color of the mouse pointer, the color and size of the outline. While this feature is great, it looks like it is related to this memory leak bug. For some reason, resetting the mouse pointer settings to their defaults fixed the problem for some people, as Mozilla notes. To restore the default mouse pointer settings in macOS Monterey, follow these steps:
- On your Mac, click the Apple logo in the upper left corner of your screen.
- Go to System Preferences .
- Go to accessibility .
- Select the Index tab in the right pane.
- Use the slider to reduce the pointer size to normal .
- Click the Reset button next to the Pointer Color field.
Restart your Mac and continue using it as usual for a while and see if the problem persists. This fix has reduced memory issues for some people using macOS Monterey, but not all. While fixing the mouse pointer is a good workaround, there is a good chance that memory leaks have more than one source. And even if you own one of those shiny new MacBook Pros with a maximum of 32GB of RAM, a mistake probably won’t save your machine.
If that solution doesn’t work, there is no choice but to sit back and hope that the upcoming macOS update fixes the problem.