Here’s How You Can Possibly Avoid macOS Monterey’s Memory Leak

An interesting article over at The Eclectic Light Company has not only explained why the claimed memory leak in macOS Monterey 12.0.1 occurs but has also detailed how users can prevent it from happening on their Macs.

For those who aren’t familiar, a number of macOS Monterey users have been experiencing “memory leak” issues, where a program or process keeps running in the background while occupying increasingly high amounts of RAM.

Turns out the issue is caused by a single group of settings in one preference pane, Accessibility. All Macs which appear to suffer this leak “are using custom pointer controls in the Pointer tab of the Display, specifically a larger than normal Pointer size and custom outline and fill colours,” notes the source.

This means that every app with an interface in which the pointer can change type will leak until this bug is fixed in Monterey. 

Here’s how you can fix the memory leak issue in macOS Monterey:

Step 1:

Open the Accessibility pane,

Step 2:

select Display at the left, then the Pointer tab.

Step 3:

Set the Pointer size to Normal, and click on the Reset button to undo any colour customisation.

Step 4:

Once done, quit all open apps and log out as the user or restart your Mac.

That’s it, no further memory leak from this cause should then occur.

Apple is expected to fix this leak in macOS Monterey 12.1, which is currently in beta-testing.