Memory Error Troubleshooting - Messages

austinwellsdev wrote:

MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 48 GB of memory. 73.71 GB for Messages?! Anyone know why this is happening and what I can do about it?

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/2bda7dee-5ee6-48ba-ac93-f3fa672aeb1c

verify your software is up to date—

The current stable release of Tahoe including bug fixes, security updates is macOS 26.1

Keep your Mac up to date - Apple Support

Keep your Mac up to date - Apple Support

—A SafeBoot Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support will sort many anomalies

Does a quick disk repair before it fully boots up, and certain system caches get cleared and rebuilt, third party system modifications and system accelerations are disabled temporarily.

Login and test. Reboot as normal and test. Caches get rebuilt automatically.

This test will tell you if third party interference; most extensions etc are not loaded in safe boot mode.

unplug all non-essential peripherals when testing

Uninstall all third party apps that are Cleaners/Optimizers/VPN/Anti-Virus

all known to cause issues on the macOS

I don't know. I had this happen to my browser twice now since I upgraded to Tahoe a couple of weeks ago (both times said it was using 70GB of RAM). Previously I only had encountered a couple of low memory situations with Ventura, but it did not show that extreme amount of RAM, plus I could easily quit the app & relaunch it without any issues, but with Tahoe that doesn't work....I need to reboot the laptop. I have a very simple configuration with just a handful of standard third party apps installed for my job. In fact I was not noticing any performance issues until Tahoe popped up the Memory Low Force Quit box....I could not Force Quit anything the 2nd time it occurred.

It does seem odd that almost anyone who mentions this memory issue is showing an app utilizing about 60GB - 70GB of RAM. I have always disliked the newer macOS memory management since it doesn't seem to recover very well if a low memory situation occurs (even before Tahoe). I have noticed Apple changing the memory management behavior between Catalina and Big Sur/Ventura, and now Tahoe. I think Apple is just waiting too long to alert to a memory low issue in Tahoe ( even to a lesser extent Ventura). At least on Ventura I can tell when memory is becoming a problem, but not on Tahoe....so something has changed.