FIX For Massive Memory Leak on Macs!

technically the assuming full screen will automatic space is false, if spaces are disabled that behavior doesn’t exist.

But further testing has revealed spaces is just a good way to reproduce the issue but not the actual cause. The leak happens when wow is hidden. you can reproduce it just as easily just going into wow menu and choosing “hide appliction” or holding option key as you click out of wow to hide it. Spaces just got noticed early because when you switch to a different space, the previous space hides (thus wow hides and triggers leak).

blizzard has made some progress isolating cause now that we discovered true cause of leak. It’ll even leak with max fps cap toggled on just MUCH slower. it leaks VERY fast with it toggled off though, so definitely don’t do that either.

But TL/DR, avoid hiding WoW to avoid leak

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Correct. What I usually do is go to another desktop, which is essentially hiding WOW and the memory leak happens. Not on all occasions though. When it leaks, it leaks fast!! I’m hoping they can figure it out soon though! :slight_smile:

I just had this memory leak crash my system while I was tabbed out of wow. The game was on another desktop space while I was using Safari for about 20-25 minutes when suddenly everything ground to a halt and I received this error message (which I had to take a picture of with my phone because the system promptly froze once I scrolled to the bottom of the list).

I’m on a Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, 64gb ram. MacOS Monterey 12.6. Here are screenshots of my graphics settings: screenshot one and screenshot two.

Grab latest update (10.0.0.46455), and memory leak should be resolved.

Glad they got a fix out for that, it was frustrating me to no end.

I’m not sure if anyone else has the issue, but the patch didn’t help me.

How so? is memory still leaking? If app is using like 4-8GB, that’s normal. and yes it will grow as it caches more resources. IE it’ll start at like 3 and grow longer it’s open but it that’s not leaking that’s caching. leaking is when it was going to 18GB, 25GB, 160GB

What issue are you having still?

My game drops to about 7 FPS per sec and stutters about every 30 secs. When I start the game it’s at 98fps and then in like a minute it instantly drops. I have tried all the settings suggested.

This doesn’t mean it’s a memory leak causing THAT issue. would need to know how much memory it’s using, how much cpu/gpu etc. Activity monitor would get you this information.

The symptom almost sounds like thermal throttling more than anything. 98fps is too high for many macs, it’d run it too hot, it’d hit thermal threshold and throttle down rapidly, repeating nearly over and over. I’d cap fps no higher than 60 on most macs. 120 on newer apple silicon ones and even then only if they are using a custom fan curve because apples will also trigger throttling.

I have a 2019 iMac for reference. It’s A retinal 5k monitor
I use it work work as well and have dual monitor that is an hp that is 4K. Since we still have that windowed bug on macs I switched my monitor on the game to the HP at full screen and suddenly everything is fine except I am still be bit hiigh hovering over 10.5 but no where as high as it was so I more than confused at this point.

I lowered the FPS to 60 like you suggested and see what happens, like I said it’s ok for one after switching out the monitor it plays on which is weird tbh.

Edit: Never mind I found where to make the setting changes you recommend.

Thanks.

Did this ever get fixed? I’ve been playing for 3 hours and I’m at 48GB usage and checking foreground FPS doesn’t seem to do much.

The blizzard memory leak was fixed ages ago. the one that’s left appears to leak in the metal 2 driver. Metal 3 is unaffected. So older gpus stuck on old path. I did some memory debugging with blizzard that actually dumped the memory space right down to everything using it and app memory on blizzard side was all normal. all the excess memory was in driver/metal 2

it was forwarded to apple, but apple about as likely to fix it as they are to go back to intel. Metal 2 is on hardware they are phasing out. on software they are phasing out. all apple silicon can run metal 3 and even the last gen intel ones can, so fixing a bug in metal 2 I wouldn’t hold breath. Could blizzard find a way to work around it? if they could find out why it leaks sure, but that’s another issue with their skeletal mac support on rushed timelines.

So does it mean those of us who have metal 2 gpus are out of options? besides buying another Mac/move to windows/not play wow?

My Mac has an RX 580X for reference.

Omegal,

I finally got an M2 Pro Mac mini 2023, the 12cpu/19gpu version w/32gb. Amazing frame rates on a new LG ultra widescreen monitor (166hz). But massive memory usage for WoW. I was trying some of the suggestions here, but I have a question anyway. Has anyone made a list of what settings to check and set for the M2 Pro Mini? There is also a noticeable in-game “pause” every 15-20 secs where it seems to freeze up, and resumes a second later. But there is nothing unusual visible in the activity monitor. Not seeing any packet loss. No frame rate loss. Nothing to explain the screen freezing. I’ve increased fan speed, but doesn’t seem to make a difference except to make the computer cooler. Any insight that you or other folks have would be GREATLY appreciated.

M2 shouldn’t have any memory leak.

what is “massive” for memory usage? if you are using native resolution and not FSR you’d probably be using several gigs for texture caching and vram but that’s normal.

3440x1440 and I only use 100% render scale, not 200% like some of you do… :wink:

16-20GB of RAM used by WOW seems high to me. To be fair, I haven’t seen it go past 22gb, but it the Mac is swapping out 9gb during this. Running only WoW, B.net app, Discord, WowUp (sometimes) and Activity Monitor.

And don’t get me started about Agent and it running rampant with Ram usage after a few days of b.net app running… 3-4 GB ram. So I kill the agent process and restart b.net every few days or so.

Any ideas about the “freeze”?

I did turn off Compute like some were suggesting but it did not help…

on higher resolution displays render scale of 50-75 makes more sense and using FSR.

that memory usage still seems high. I’ve not seen it that high on anything but metal 2, but that mac def shouldn’t be on metal 2 render path so I have no idea.

FSR? Full Screen Resolution?

I already had my stuff toggled properly and I still get memory leaks beyond 24gb (my macbook only has 16gb of ram)

Is there any way to fix this?

I use a MacBook Pro 2017 and it’s running Ventura