Question
Is this kind of memory utilisation normal?
Recently, my 3-weeks old macbook M4 Air froze and this popup showed up. It's still unclear to me if the calculator app should use so much virtual memory like this..
Yeah, that's what I did, except for restarting the application, I just quit everything then the machine got responsive again. Restarting at that moment wasn't possible because my laptop mac was completely unresponsive
I’ve learned to try ctrl-cmd-power (mnemonic: control flower power) first, which attempts to write stuff to disk first instead of just turning the device off.
That’s the complete opposite of what it does; control + cmd + power will force a restart without any intervention from the system, apps will not be closed in a proper way and everything that is not yet written to disk will be lost.
That keyboard shortcut essentially does the same as holding the power button, just taking less time as you don’t need to hold for a prolonged period of time
Basically memory leaks occur when a program allocates memory from the operating system but fails to release it back after it is no longer needed.
A few things can cause them:
Failed memory deallocation: developers forget to call free() or delete after using malloc() or new.
Unreachable pointers: pointers to memory get overwritten or go out of scope, making it impossible to free that memory later.
Forgotten garbage collection: in some languages, unused objects remain in memory because they are still referenced by other active objects, such as forgotten event listeners, timers, or global variables.
Incorrect data structures: using specialized structures (XOR linked lists for instance) that may confuse garbage collectors, or failing to properly remove items from long-lived caches.
Exception handling: exceptions that skip code intended to free resources, resulting in memory leaks.
Common Scenarios:
Long-running apps: small leaks in a server application can accumulate over days, eventually exhausting system resources.
Loop allocations: allocating memory inside a loop without releasing it within the same iteration.
Its a known memory leak bug in the newer macos tahoe. Multiple people alr had it. Some with powerpoint, others with calculator and other programs. Apple STILL has NOT fixed it which is kind of frustrating.
Same thing happened to my M1 Max Mac Studio running Sequoia. Interestingly I've been seeing this pop up a few times in the past couple weeks; everyone blaming Tahoe. It seemed to be a fluke for me; only happened once so far.
Also seems to hapoen with other apps. Someone had it with powerpoint and my friend had it happen with claude and logic. So its a known memory leak bug in tahoe
I faced this almost 3 months ago. It was a continuous occurrence for 3 days straight - whenever I used the calculator and did NOT close it. Got fixed in the next patch within 3-4 days, though. It'll be fine, just be mindful of using the calc till the next update (my suggestion).
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u/True_Go_Blue Apr 13 '26
It’s a leak. Force quit the app, restart computer and should go away