Stealth memory leak on Big Sur 11.6.2

[mi7chy]

Thought it was just Monterey that's affected by memory leak but I'm also seeing it on latest Big Sur 11.6.2. No apps open yet it's using nearly all 16GB RAM and doesn't show on activity monitor sorted by largest first.

 

[SpecMode]

Make sure you also have the "Real Mem" column enabled, which shows each process' total footprint in physical memory.

 

[chrfr]

In addition to showing the real memory, also make sure you're viewing "All processes" rather than just "My processes."

 

[mi7chy]

It's the notorious WindowServer process when viewing "all processes". Strange that the process was using >32GB while system usage showed ~16GB with no swap.