Curious to know what levels of memory usage others see for VoiceOver on their Mac

By Cobbler, 5 November, 2021

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I would be curious to hear the memory usage that others see for VoiceOver on their Mac.

My own monitoring of this over the past couple days has shown a usage ranging from 77mb right now shortly after restarting VoiceOver, all the way up to 1.6gb.

That range and peak strikes me as incredibly large, particularly when there are few other processes/applications on my Mac which get over 200mb. For me, the increase in VoiceOver's memory usage appears to be a gradual one over time, with me doing nothing more demanding on my Mac when the usage was at 1.6gb than right now.

This has me wondering whether the times when VoiceOver will go in to its “busy, busy, busy” state (now “Safari not responding” as of Monterey) coincides with when VoiceOver is eating up loads of memory.

From my own limited testing, toggling VoiceOver off and back on again brings memory usage down, and also seems to make the “busy” go away for a while.

This is on a M1 MacBook Air with 8gb of memory.

To check your own system, open Activity Monitor; select memory from “Segmented Control radio group” in the toolbar; and then locate VoiceOver in the table of processes/applications.

In just the short time writing this post, VoiceOver's memory usage has already increased from 77mb to 180mb.

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Comments

By Jason White on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 15:31

It's definitely increasing over time. However, I have a Microsoft OneDrive process which is reported as using 3.24GB, so VoiceOver isn't the only interesting case here.

I don't know how Mac OS reports memory usage, so it isn't clear whether there's a memory leak or not. I haven't been experiencing significant VoiceOver performance issues (as in "not responding" messages associated with unresponsive applications). On the other hand, this is a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip and 32GB of memory.

By Kilroy on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 15:31

VoiceOver is currently using 3.2GB of memory on my MacBook Air.

Does anybody know why there might be such differences, and input articular why memory usage increases? And, I guess even more fundamentally, whether memory usage actually translates in to a hit on performance?

By Ekaj on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 15:31

I've been noticing this too as of late, particularly on crowded websites that don't appear to be formatted correctly. But in addition, my MacBook Air is from mid-2013 and I think is soon to be retired. A tutor and I have been talking with my parents about replacing it, and they are very receptive. I, too, have noticed that the "Safari Busy" messages seem to go away when toggling VO off and then back on.

By dog on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 15:31

1.6 GB seems fine. I'd look into other apps that might be eating your RAM, since getting slowdowns in a new M1 Macbook sounds odd.

What other apps do you use?
Do you have a browser running with many tabs?
Chrome and Slack are two RAM hogs, specially Chrome.

By mr grieves on Sunday, November 28, 2021 - 15:31

I am beginning to doubt myself, but I am swear I saw it at 77gb the other day. I just went into Activity Monitoring and it started at about 104mb but I can see it slowly creeping up. It's not 109mb and all I've done is flip between this window and activity monitor. It does feel like there is a memory leak in there somewhere.

This is on an Intel iMac.

By mr grieves on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 - 15:31

I reported this to accessibility@apple.com and they replied suggesting that I disable automatic language selection. Sadly I didn't have it enabled, but thought I would post it here in case it helps someone. This is what they told me: "we have been investigating a similar behavior when automatic language switching is enabled. If you open the rotor, VO-Shift-Command-Left or Right until you arrive on the Voices selection, is “automatically select backed on language” active? If so, does the behavior stop if you change it to a different voce?"

By mr grieves on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 - 15:31

I installed Monterey 12.1 last night and am looking at Activity Monitor and the VoiceOver memory usage looks a lot healthier.
Prioer to the update, I would look at it and I could see it going up 0.1mb every couple of seconds. Now it fluctuates up and down a little bit seems to be pretty stable at about 35-36mb.

It's way too early to say if it's fully fixed as I've not been using it long but it's looking good so far.

By Cobbler on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 - 15:31

In reply to by mr grieves

I updated my Mac nearly 24 hours ago. Since then I haven't restarted VoiceOver. Activity Monitor currently reports that VoiceOver is using less than 50mb of memory. Before yesterday's update, the memory usage would climb whilst I simply sat looking at Activity Monitor. Within 24 hours of restarting VoiceOver, I would typically expect the memory usage to be over 1gb, and easily go above 3gb if I went a couple of days without restarting VoiceOver.

So, yes, early signs are definitely encouraging.

I am also struggling to recall any instances in the past 24 hours of VoiceOver reporting that an application was not responding. Even though I have only used my Mac lightly in this time, the lack of these announcements is remarkable.

🤞

It's now nearly 3 days since I installed macOS 12.1, and VoiceOver's memory usage has yet to go over 70mb.

Considering that I had previously been seeing levels of over 3gb, it appears that Apple has indeed resolved a memory issue in this update.

I have now encountered some “app not responding” messages, but it *feels* like they are less common.

By Quin on Tuesday, December 28, 2021 - 15:31

I once got VoiceOver to use about 10 gigs of my ram. But after this recent update, the absolute most I saw it at was 100 MB. It's currently at about 50.

By mr grieves on Friday, January 28, 2022 - 15:31

It's been great for me for a while. I upgraded to 12.2 last night, and just now wondered why my Mac was crawling along only to find VoiceOver using 49gb.

Might be a one-off but thought I'd put a warning out. If it happens again I will report it to Apple.

By mr grieves on Friday, January 28, 2022 - 15:31

Maybe I panicked a little. Since then it's behaved itself fine and is stable under 40mb. So maybe it was something I just happened to be doing.