Major memory leak on 12.2 M1 (systemstats)

[Jimmy_Banks]

I have been fighting with this memory leak since 12.2 was released. Is anybody else experiencing the same?

Systemstats I've caught using up to 20gb of ram. I have to constantly force quit it, and usually it is back up to using 3+ gb of ram within 30 minutes.

I have been unable to identify if there is a trigger causing the problem. Monterey has been probably the worst OS I've had the misfortune of using since Vista.

The lsd and mds ram levels are undoubtedly much too high as well.

 

[Slartibart]

did you read this? …. “using a non-standard cursor size or colors causes a large memory leak”

 

[Jimmy_Banks]

did you read this? …. “using a non-standard cursor size or colors causes a large memory leak”

Unfortunately I have, I've always had the pointer set to default.

 

[thomasjpr]

Yes, I've seen this very same issue with systemstats. Not sure what triggers it (I have never changed pointer settings from default). I will be running fine, with a few weeks of uptime, and suddenly systemstats has grabbed 20GB+ of RAM.

 

[megastep]

I have been having that exact same issue for months now on my M1 MacBookPro (16GB, 12.2.1). Literally every day when I wake it up from sleep, the systemstats process has ballooned overnight up to an enormous amount (sometimes up to 20GB!).

Issuing a `sudo killall systemstats` command in my terminal has become a daily routine now. This is just ridiculous and doesn't happen on my Intel Macs with the same OS. It's likely a nasty bug in Apple's M1 fork of their code.

 

[gcortesi]

did you read this? …. “using a non-standard cursor size or colors causes a large memory leak”

Slartibart - Thanks for this tip - turns out that was my problem on my M1 MacBook Pro. I was using a non-standard pointer color. Oooof!!! Nice to see the Memory Pressure in Activity Monitor be green again. Systemstats was grabbing 20GB+ all the time! Jimmy_Banks - hope you were able to resolve your issue.

 

[coolfactor]

I noticed my 2021 MacBook Air being sluggish, and systemstats was consuming 97% CPU. First time experiencing this.

I'd recommend *against* force-quitting, but do a graceful reboot instead. That lets the process shut down cleanly.

No problems after a reboot (so far).

 

[Jimmy_Banks]

I noticed my 2021 MacBook Air being sluggish, and systemstats was consuming 97% CPU. First time experiencing this.

I'd recommend *against* force-quitting, but do a graceful reboot instead. That lets the process shut down cleanly.

No problems after a reboot (so far).

It will be back.

 

[TonyK]

The issue and urgency is for people who are visually impaired and need larger or brighter cursors in order to work with their computer. Telling users to change back to the default (and small) cursor and color could make the difference of them being able to use their computer or not.

 

[darnel_cz]

Still have this issue with MacBook Air (M1, 2020) on Monterey 12.3.1. I believe it didn't happen it in some previous version. My mouse pointer is default.
I'm afraid it might be cause of SSD writes (due to swapping).

 

[MLM]

I also have this issue on an M1 Mac Mini with standard cursor size. It's infuriating.

 

[TriciaMacMillan]

Having the default mouse cursor, I’ve had this problem recently under 12.4 to the point where my MacBook couldn’t even manage to reboot any more - it wouldn’t shut down. Had to power off the hard way.

I find it quite annoying that Apple doesn’t communicate anything on behalf of M1 problems, but leaves it to their customers to track them down.

 

[ssbmaccom]

What I did yesterday and till now it looks promising:

• I cleaned up some older software including Docker App (which had some issues)
• I cleaned up the files systemstats is writing to (see below)
• Afterwards reboot my iMac

Not sure, what helped but I assume cleaning up older systemstat files made the trick. Maybe these were copied from my older MBP during Account Migration and systemstats had a hard job dealing with them.

Check the files first using "systemstats --list-files". If you see a bunch of files, removing them may help. You can also use "ls -l /private/var/db/systemstats/*" to check what is there.
After this cleanup, systemstats behaves reasonable for almost 24 hours (iMac was in Sleep during the night - and usually first thing in the morning was to kill systemstats). "systemstats --list-files" shows no database files there and "ls -l /private/var/db/systemstats" shows a few files and no DB files.

I will inspect them - may help to find more things to clean up ;-)

 

[gcortesi]

Slartibart - Thanks for this tip - turns out that was my problem on my M1 MacBook Pro. I was using a non-standard pointer color. Oooof!!! Nice to see the Memory Pressure in Activity Monitor be green again. Systemstats was grabbing 20GB+ all the time! Jimmy_Banks - hope you were able to resolve your issue.

I spoke too soon. I'm now running OS 13.1 and I am now using a MacBook Air M2. I am using a standard pointer color and yet I see 20GB+ of RAM being grabbed by systemstats. I setup a cron job to kill systemstats on a regular basis to keep things under control. Does anyone have fix? It seems things are back to the way they were in OS 12 now in OS 13.