macOS showing extremely high virtual memory usage for every process (in htop and top)

Question

I am not even 100% sure if this is an issue, because htop on macOS is known to show very high virtual memory usage. However, I never noticed VIRT values that were so consistently high before, and I was recently experimenting with taskpolicy usage, so I want to verify that things aren't broken.

When I run htop, every process shows 0 for virtual memory usage, or at least 32.1G:

And every Safari process has >100G:

I stumbled onto the htop issue above, and I'm concerned about the behavior of my machine because every process has an excessively high VIRT value, and even top shows a total virtual memory size of 22T:

In comparison, the htop issue above only shows a handful of processes with high virt values. Likewise, Activity Monitor isn't showing any abnormal memory usage:

Is this a bug in htop (or elsewhere)? A configuration mistake on my end? Or is it just the result of a change in how macOS calculates virtual memory?

For reference, I am currently running macOS Monterey 12.0.1 on a 2017 13" MacBook Pro.

Answer 1

The reason that many processes show 0 in the VIRT column, and the rest show a very value is simply that you're running htop as an ordinary user. Ordinary users are not allowed to inquire this information about processes owned by other users, so you'll see a 0 for those processes - and those started under your own user account have their actual values.

You can solve this issue simply by running htop with sudo like this:

sudo htop

Also note: The values you're seeing are actually not excessive. These values do not indicate any kind of problem, error, bug, performance issue, or the like with your system.