Big Sur 11.6.2: as swap space utilization increases, the system crashes at some point

[cfm56d7b]

I noticed this behavior after upgrading to Big Sur 11.6.2 from Big Sur 11.6.1.

System: 2020 MBPro 13" 2.3 GHz / 16 GB / 1 Tb. The latest Intel based hardware.

After rebooting and opening all productivity apps: swap space used = 0.

After 4 days of using Safari (8 tabs max), Chrome (2 tabs), Word, Excel, WhatsApp, Slack, Messages, Outlook: swap space utilization grows to 7 gigabytes. Practically all applications show consistent memory usage increase. I wrote OS level code in the past. It appears that the each process continues to allocate memory in the private area and doesn't release it for reasons unknown. This is a classic memory leak but the question is why it affects practically every process. It's difficult to imagine that this scenario was not properly tested by Apple's OS team. It's easy to execute and is a part of any regression test.

Once swap space utilization grows beyond 7 gigabytes, the system slows down considerably - no surprise - and can crash at any time.

Today it crashed and after rebooting the laptop could not detect presence of a 2nd 4K monitor directly attached to the right TB3 port. The second reboot indicated "system had to be restarted" and finally both 4K monitors were detected.

I have to admit that Catalina was perhaps the most stable MacOS with none of the Big Sur likely memory leaks (and I worked on memory leaks more than most engineers).

I upgraded to Big Sur because newer Thunderbolt docking stations requite Big Sur or above.

 

[chabig]

When you say crash you mean kernel panic, right? You should look for clues in the panic log.

Explainer: kernel panics and crashes

Apps may crash, but kernels panic. Don’t accept your Mac just panics often. It should never panic at all, and more than one panic a year needs to be properly investigated and reported.

eclecticlight.co

 

[cfm56d7b]

When you say crash you mean kernel panic, right? You should look for clues in the panic log.

Explainer: kernel panics and crashes

Apps may crash, but kernels panic. Don’t accept your Mac just panics often. It should never panic at all, and more than one panic a year needs to be properly investigated and reported.

eclecticlight.co

Yes - kernel panic. Thanks for link. Will review.

The art of writing software has advanced significantly but as long as humans write software and other humans manage engineering processes the outcome is very predictable. Memory leaks should not occur.

 

[chabig]

Yes. But mistakes do get fixed in updates. Must you stay on Big Sur?

 

[cfm56d7b]

Yes. But mistakes do get fixed in updates. Must you stay on Big Sur?

I am also carefully watching Monterey new bug reports: USB port issues, memory leaks (which I suspect simply migrated from Big Sur code base). Not encouraging. Will most likely stay on Big Sur 11.6.2 until Monterey is stable enough.

 

[chabig]

I think Monterey is just the name of the most modern version of Big Sur. Installing Monterey was less of a jump than going from Catalina to Big Sur. I’ve been running it without problem since it was released.