WindowServer taking unholy amount of RAM in 10.13

[iamMacPerson]

I thought I might be alone. I installed High Sierra on my production machine hoping that Apple would release the HEVC-compatible version of FCPX right after (spoiler: they still haven't). Plugging in my 4k monitor scaled to 2560x1440 causes WindowSever to eat up 17GB of RAM alone. Everything else gets swapped to the disk (plus 1GB from WS, fun!). Unplugging the monitor and rebooting seem to have fixed the issue, but now I know to keep an eye on the issue. If this was prevalent during beta and still in 10.13.1, I wonder if Apple even knows it's there. Debating on rolling back to Sierra, but that would take forever to undo APFS, restore from my backup drive, etc. A clean erase, install, and restore of High Sierra took 18 hours for me, because I'm not about to let the OS installer reformat my drive without doing it clean.

Question, even if I wanted to go back to Sierra, can I restore from an older Time Machine backup? I know High Sierra has already backed up to my drive, and the only times I've had to use Time Machine I've just been able to restore the latest.

2015 MBP 15", 2.2GHz i7, Iris Pro only, 16GB.

 

[labyrinth153]

Can confirm windowserver process using 12gb of ram on my 2015 imac 27”. Switched to default scaling and rebooted. If window server jumps to over 1gb I’ll assume its not a bug in window scaling. Will be reporting to Apple.

 

[AP00]

If this was prevalent during beta and still in 10.13.1, I wonder if Apple even knows it's there. Debating on rolling back to Sierra, but that would take forever to undo APFS, restore from my backup drive, etc. A clean erase, install, and restore of High Sierra took 18 hours for me, because I'm not about to let the OS installer reformat my drive without doing it clean.

I filed a bug a couple of days ago and Apple acknowledged it and marked it as a duplicate, so they received more than one report and they definitely know about the issue. Also reports from people who tried the 10.13.1 beta seems to be at least encouraging, so I'd suggest to wait until the release before embarking in such a long and tedious procedure.

 

[jerwin]

I can confirm that I am also having this issue after 'fresh installing' from Sierra to High Sierra on a MacBookPro10,1

Console.app constantly keeps reporting this:

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.preference.displays.MirrorDisplays): Service only ran for 0 seconds
Pushing respawn out by 10 seconds.

that happens when I turn on mirroring on my imac, but WindowServer's memory footprint is still only 150-200 MB.

 

[labyrinth153]

Quite a few hours using and it is hovering around 250mb. Definitely better without scaling. I'll try to enable scaling and see if it climbs.

 

[mathias-i]

18GB ? B*tch pls - try 45GB. My poor 2012 Mac Mini is sweating

 

[barnesy99]

Same problem here. 16GB ram and WindowServer is using 12GB!!

Am running scaled resolution too, but hate the default display resolution so don't really wanna switch....

Fingers crossed it's fixed soon!

 

[blockloop]

I have a 4k monitor that I have been running scaled at 1440. I changed the scaling to "Default" on both the built in display and the external monitor, disconnected the monitor, restarted, logged in, connected the external monitor and haven't seen WindowServer get above 160MB of memory with 0 compressed memory.

Everything is huge and I hate this resolution, but it's better than the alternative for now. Hope it's fixed soon.

 

[Shackss]

I have a problem with WindowServer too, but it's eating CPU not RAM. 2014 rMBP 13in, 2 displays of 2560x1440 hooked up on it. No problem at all on Sierra. Restart fixes the problem and then works for a while, but reoccurs and needs another restart.

 

[KingOfStuff]

i was having this same WindowServer leak eating up 20G of Real Memory. Out of randomly trying different things to see if it would change.. i got to using Safari Tech Preview as default over Safari. For some reason WindowServer now just uses around 2G of Real Memory.

 

[felefant]

18GB ? B*tch pls - try 45GB. My poor 2012 Mac Mini is sweating

Gotcha.

 

[EugW]

Gotcha.

View attachment 725223

 

[Polpol1]

Windowserver eating up 7 Gig on my Late 2013 Macbook Pro High Sierra. No other displays attached. Seems to be rising continuously, I suspect some weird memory leak?

 

[Erulezz]

Windowserver eating up 7 Gig on my Late 2013 Macbook Pro High Sierra. No other displays attached. Seems to be rising continuously, I suspect some weird memory leak?

Yes there is a memory leak which is most likely to be fixed in 10.13.1 (according to reports from beta testers). Do you use resolution scaling?

 

[Polpol1]

Yes there is a memory leak which is most likely to be fixed in 10.13.1 (according to reports from beta testers). Do you use resolution scaling?

Yes, I am using resolution scaling! Will turn it off and see what changes. Otherwise I will keep it off until the update. Thanks.

 

[Polpol1]

Yes, I am using resolution scaling! Will turn it off and see what changes. Otherwise I will keep it off until the update. Thanks.

That fixed the problem indeed. An hour later still at 170 MB. Thanks.
Why anyone would want to update before the .1 version is a mystery to me. My iPhone 6s has an amazing low battery life since iOS 11, now this problem. Won't update anything Apple anymore until 6 months after any new software version. Quite disappointing.

 

[tarkh]

macOS 10.13.4
GTX 1060
Nvidia Web Driver 387.10.10.10.30.106
Monitor Philips BDM4037U (4K, connected with DisplayPort)

Having same problem with WindowServer memory leak - it keeps growing.
Have tried turning Scaling on / off without any success.
Any ideas? Thank you!

 

[Shackss]

macOS 10.13.4
GTX 1060
Nvidia Web Driver 387.10.10.10.30.106
Monitor Philips BDM4037U (4K, connected with DisplayPort)

Having same problem with WindowServer memory leak - it keeps growing.
Have tried turning Scaling on / off without any success.
Any ideas? Thank you!

Yes, switch back to Sierra and be done with High Vista.

 

[shafez]

I don't have this problem and window server is not running on my 13" late 2013 MBP with HS 10.13.4, Am I missing something here?

 

[Shackss]

I don't have this problem and window server is not running on my 13" late 2013 MBP with HS 10.13.4, Am I missing something here?

Are you using external displays?

 

[shafez]

Are you using external displays?

Sorry, I didn't notice it is only with external monitors.

 

[w1z]

Same issue here but with 27UK850-W LG monitor which I only recently bought and started using.. WindowsServer consumes over 2GB of memory..

So I went over the logs in search of the cause and can conclude that LG's OnScreen Control & LG OSC MultiMonitor are behind the excess ram usage by WindowsServer.

Uninstalled both apps and WindowsServer is hovering at 400MB. More so, the strange crashes in finder which I was experiencing are no longer occurring.

LG doesn't tell you how to uninstall these apps - so I went digging.. Locate the OnScreenControl folder in /Library and double click on the 'unInstall' bash script file then reboot.

This worked for me. YMMV with other monitors.

 

[tarkh]

I found one solution to my problem, but still testing it... so what I did:

1. I completely uninstalled WebDriver from control panel.
2. Then installed OLD version of Nvidia WebDriver with help of webdriver.sh script. But SIP must be turned off first. I don’t know is it allowed to post links here, excuse me if not. Here is detailed manual: https://hackintosher.com/forums/thr...drivers-with-webdriver-sh-on-a-hackintosh.48/

So after reverting WebDriver version, my problem with WindowServer memory leak gone, but there is still minor bugs with this solution, so I’ll be back with more information after some more tests. Thanks!

UPDATE
Ok, so finally I've come to solution witch works for me fine, fixes WindowServer memory leak in latest macOS 10.13.4 (Nvidia 1060 gtx with external 4k monitor through DP in my case):
Installed latest WebDriver (https://images.nvidia.com/mac/pkg/387/WebDriver-387.10.10.10.30.103.pkg) through webdriver.sh script and now everything works fine. I don't know why regular installation type (with System Pref menu) messes everything up..

 

[Okasian]

Yes, switch back to Sierra and be done with High Vista.

Switched back to Sierra from a 'pretty clean, brew+terminal for most things' High Sierra last week.

Metal 2 on WindowServer has considerably slowed down my machine, even though it should technically be supported. (rMBP, Mid 2012)

Sierra and it’s general responsiveness feels super zippy by comparison.

I don’t miss High Sierra and I don’t think I’ll be upgrading until it’s absolutely necessary.

inb4 older hardware, lots of startup items etc.

 

[fefe79]

I'm sure they see the problem. WindowServer was rewritten in HS for Metal 2 support.

Yeah about that, we are in 2019 and 16Gs of RAM is not enough.
Apple seems to follow the Microsoft/and many other currently big company's route,

"cannot make a good OS/software, so let's make a big/buggy/slow one. RAM/CPU/etc not enough, well no problem, user will buy new one (every 2 year, just to keep planned obsolescence), quality, well not an issue, they're still buying, who cares!!!!"​

I remember back in the early days of PC softwares were at least written with Backwards compatibility in mind, plus as memory efficient and fast as possibly can.

Today look at Ubuntu or other linux, they can make less resource hungry OS. I dunno for how long as there I see a trend toward the above a bit.

What do you guys think?