https://eclecticlight.co/2022/05/30/why-montereys-finder-find-memory-leak-may-not-be-fixed/ Skip to content [eclecticlight] The Eclectic Light Company Macs, painting, and more Main navigation Menu * Downloads * M1 Macs * Mac Problems * Mac articles * Art * Macs * Painting hoakley May 30, 2022 Macs, Technology Why Monterey's Finder Find memory leak may not be fixed One popular plan to avoid bugs introduced in a new major version of macOS is to use the final release of the last one. If you're thinking of upgrading from Big Sur to Monterey when Apple releases macOS 13 this autumn/fall, you might like to think twice, as there's a major memory leak which may well remain in Monterey for ever. The bug This memory leak affects all models of Mac, both Intel and M1, running any version of Monterey from its initial public release 12.0.1 to the latest update 12.4. As it affects one of the key features of the Finder, if you use the macOS GUI sooner or later you're likely to come across it, and for some users it's severe. It only affects the Finder's Find command (in the File menu), and doesn't affect Spotlight itself, or third-party products which use Spotlight search, such as Find Any File or HoudahSpot. If you never ever use the Finder's Find feature, then you can stop reading here, as you won't encounter this bug. When you set a Finder window into Find mode and start typing characters into its search box, the Finder launches an interactive search which homes in more narrowly as you type additional characters. What happens is that each of those searches is retained in memory, rather than being purged when a new search is started. The amount of memory used each time is determined by the number of 'hits' obtained at that moment. The more files that Mac has in its Spotlight database, the more hits are likely, and in some cases their number can be vast. For example, let's say you start typing the word syzygy, which should have very few hits. When you've just typed the first character s there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of hits. As those are being delivered to the Finder, its memory use grows rapidly. Add the second character y and the rate of memory use slows sharply, as there are far fewer hits, and after the third character z there should be even fewer. What should happen is that, as the search is refined, the previous search is terminated and its partial search results are cleared from memory, which reduces the amount of memory used by the Finder. That doesn't happen, though, and memory use continues to rise, never to be freed, even when you close that window to finish using Find. Workarounds If you're only an occasional light user of the Find feature, you can use it without the Finder outgrowing your Mac's memory, provided that your Mac generally has plenty of free memory. Instead of typing search terms one character at a time, you can paste in more specific text which is only likely to return less than a thousand hits, which should only consume around 5 MB each time. Any growth in the Finder's memory use will then be small, and essentially unnoticeable. The (literally) big danger is typing one character in and leaving the search to run: do that once, and the Finder's memory use could readily rise into several GB. When the Finder's use of memory grows too high for your Mac, before it starts hitting performance, open the Force Quit dialog by pressing Command-Option-Escape, select the Finder there, and click the button to Relaunch it. memory06 If you can't be so disciplined, or rely on Find frequently, or if your Mac has more limited physical memory, then there are three main options. For straightforward searches, use Spotlight from the menu bar, which doesn't appear to have any such problem. For more intensive file searches, look at Thomas Tempelmann's Find Any File (FAF), which costs around $/EUR/PS 6 direct or in the App Store. This is an excellent utility which does a great deal more than Finder's Find ever will. spotplus03 For more sophisticated Spotlight search, including file metadata and contents, HoudahSpot is more expensive, at around $/EUR/PS 32, is by far the most powerful Spotlight-based search utility, and worth every penny. spotplus04 Neither FAF nor HoudahSpot has any memory leak, and both work excellently in Monterey. Why this may not be fixed This memory leak has been reported to Apple, and is the only significant reproducible memory leak known to remain in Monterey. However, it looks as if fixing it requires more extensive surgery. This is because it involves both Spotlight, whose searches appear to continue consuming CPU and memory after they should have been cancelled, and the Finder, which appears unable to free the memory from cancelled searches. macOS has a track record of leaving well-known bugs in final major releases when more extensive work is required to fix them. Among those was failure in the DAS/CTS dispatching system which caused automatic Time Machine backups to fail in Sierra, APFS support for Fusion Drives in High Sierra, and painfully slow Time Machine backups in Catalina. Each of those was only fixed in the next major release of macOS. Of course I hope I'm wrong, and this memory leak gets fixed in 12.5, but the chances are falling. One of the penalties with using the last release of the previous major version of macOS is that, while it will still get two years of security updates, it won't get any other bugs fixed. If you couldn't live with this or any other bug left in the final version of Monterey before the release of macOS 13, then it isn't going to prove a good choice. Share this: * Twitter * Facebook * Reddit * Pinterest * Email * Print * Like this: Like Loading... Related Posted in Macs, Technology and tagged bug, Find Any File, Finder, HoudahSpot, macOS 12, memory leak, Monterey. Bookmark the permalink. 12Comments Add yours 1. 1 [e66f3ec47a1c] Joey Jay on May 30, 2022 at 3:18 pm Reply You may also be able to work around this bug by storing shortcuts to Smart Folders in the Finder sidebar. https://support.apple.com/en-sa/guide/mac-help/mchlp2804/12.0/mac /12.0 LikeLiked by 1 person + 2 [6986a746f627] hoakley on May 30, 2022 at 7:36 pm Reply Thanks for the suggestion - unfortunately all it does is expose another presumably related memory leak in CoreSpotlightService. Mine is now stuck using 2.68 GB! So no, please don't try that at home. Howard. LikeLike 2. 3 [99de0a3f33cf] chrish1961 on May 30, 2022 at 8:44 pm Reply I get the same crash in Preview if the open document has a large number of hits as I type the search term. I wonder if this is related to the Finder bug. If so, it might be a system service being called by the app that's the problem. LikeLiked by 1 person + 4 [6986a746f627] hoakley on May 30, 2022 at 10:31 pm Reply Thank you. The Finder doesn't crash - it just hogs the CPU and gobbles up memory. I think this is a combination, and Spotlight services are certainly involved, but not one of the separate Spotlight processes, as the Finder takes the memory and CPU, no other process. Howard. LikeLike 3. 5 [6a2a454191fa] defjaf on May 31, 2022 at 11:07 am Reply I usually search from the command line. Does `mdfind` suffer from the same bug? LikeLiked by 1 person + 6 [6986a746f627] hoakley on May 31, 2022 at 2:38 pm Reply Not as far as I know. Howard LikeLike 4. 7 [ded6beb516a9] markbot2zero on May 31, 2022 at 2:34 pm Reply Thank you, Howard. I've read some of your other articles about this issue, and forgive if I've missed it, but what's the remedy for the leak? 1. Does Force Quitting Finder work? 2. Logout / Log back in? 3. Restarting the Mac? 4. Nine pound sledge hammer? 5. Something else? Thanks in advance. -Mark LikeLiked by 1 person + 8 [6986a746f627] hoakley on May 31, 2022 at 2:37 pm Reply Thank you. Forcing the Finder to restart should restore its normal memory. Howard LikeLike 5. 9 Michael Tsai - Blog - macOS 12.4 on May 31, 2022 at 7:25 pm Reply [...] (2022-05-31): Howard Oakley [...] LikeLike 6. 10 [ca1a2310e05c] blammo on June 1, 2022 at 8:05 am Reply The 'find' feature on Finder has ironically been hit and miss about finding files I *know* are there. I'd highly recommend EasyFind by Devonthink - it lives up to its name in being easy to use and actually finding files. It's free too. https:// www.devontechnologies.com/apps/freeware LikeLiked by 1 person + 11 [6986a746f627] hoakley on June 1, 2022 at 12:10 pm Reply Thank you. Yes, it's free, but you should look at FAF, which is faster and far more capable, despite being very cheap. Howard. LikeLike 7. 12 [67761e9b9376] Dustin on June 1, 2022 at 10:49 pm Reply Hi, just wanted to say that you can hold "Option" and right-click the Finder icon in your Dock, and you will how have the option to "Relaunch". 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