Memory consumption of apps under macOS 26 "Tahoe"

Thanks for the post and thanks for the feedback number. Looks like you didn’t run it under the Xcode Instruments to see if the memory is a memory leak or something else? Providing a Instrument trace will help you as well as in the feedback to see why is the app loading so much memory.

Newer macOS versions may employ more advanced rendering techniques that utilize additional memory for caching and effects to improve visual fidelity and responsiveness if available. Changes in how macOS manages background apps and pre-fetches data might contribute to higher baseline memory usage.

If your app handles images or textures, ensure that caching mechanisms are efficient and purge unused resources promptly and here using instruments will help you to know what objects are being loaded. Employ Xcode’s Instruments, especially the Allocations and Time Profiler tools, to pinpoint where excess memory is being used and identify any unexpected overhead introduced by system frameworks.

Hope you go over the path to use Instruments as have provided to me great resources understanding how the app loads memory and uses memory overtime as well help me to change the code when I realized I had a memory issue in the app that only show after a while. Hope you embrace that tool.

Albert Pascual
  Worldwide Developer Relations.

Hi Albert,

Thanks for your swift reply! I had used Instruments to analyze the app's memory allocations and releases without identifying any significant memory leak (under macOS 26). I'm happy to dive deeper supply an Instrument trace in the corresponding ticket, these days.

On the macOS 15 virtual machine, Xcode / Instruments is not installed, but honestly I expect other developers to have similar observations, and I'm not talking about some minor increase, but (in my productive app) by five times...

Regarding the mentioned consumption by Thumbnail - which was way beyond any justified memory allocation: I could neither reproduce the customer's issue, nor debug / analyze app's Preview / Thumbnail extensions (actually I filed a corresponding DTS ticket): Without "qlmanage" to work for modern extensions, Xcode is not properly attaching the running extension to the Finder - or is just me, missing some concrete instructions (what I asked for in the DTS request).

Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to provide more information if / when my time allows, but it honestly looks like Tahoe has some serious memory management issues, and I'd appreciate your teams taking developer's feedback as a call for action...

What I just forgot: In the FB ticket I mentioned the Apple ID of my productive app, so you could just run the app under Sequoia and Tahoe ... unfortunately it is way too complex to act as a sample app (that's why I was additionally providing the minimal app with a less dramatic result)...

Thanks for providing all this, this is going to be very helpful. I would still recommend to provide an instruments trace into the FB number if possible. Will be great to have actually 2 of them, the previous macOS version to compare it with.

Thanks again for all this!

Albert Pascual
  Worldwide Developer Relations.