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After a fresh restart, everything is smooth. During the next couple of days of regular usage of the system, a problem of responsiveness gradually increases, until you can count a full second between you swiping a desktop and the system actually responding to the gesture.

I've tried reducing memory pressure by closing high memory apps, but it doesn't help at all.

Video demonstration here.

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  • What does the CPU tab in Activity Monitor show?
    – nohillside ♦
    Jan 30, 2022 at 13:31
  • @nohillside no significant usage by any app
    – Birowsky
    Jan 30, 2022 at 13:33
  • Also, what about the swiping behaviorist shown in the video worries you? Do you have some more specific examples of „slow“ or „lagging“?
    – nohillside ♦
    Jan 30, 2022 at 13:34
  • While I don't know the exact issue that you're running into, I tend to start seeing issues with my MacBook Pro after an uptime of 25+ days. What kind of memory usage are you seeing, how many VM files do you see in /var/vm/ ?
    – ErniePC12
    Jan 30, 2022 at 13:35
  • And Monterey has some known issues with memory not getting freed (e.g. when using „find“ in Finder), which could explain the memory pressure you see
    – nohillside ♦
    Jan 30, 2022 at 13:35

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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This turned out to be an issue with the Dock process. It's fixed by restarting it with:

killall -KILL Dock

Now I wish I knew what corrupts it in the first place.

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  • You could delete the Dock preference plists and 'start again'. I seem to recall that some other features fall under the Dock process, but I can't remember what.
    – benwiggy
    Jul 1, 2022 at 10:13
  • @benwiggy what do you mean by "Dock preference plists"?
    – Birowsky
    Jul 2, 2022 at 11:04
  • In the user Library/Preferences folder, files like com.apple.Dock.plist and the matching .db file. Then log out/in or restart.
    – benwiggy
    Jul 2, 2022 at 14:31
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macOS Monterey is known to have massive memory leaks. The root cause is not yet quite clear. One memory leak I know of is that, when searching from Finder, the memory allocated for the search is not released any more.

Check the activity monitor for high memory usage of any process and kill that process.

Other memory leaks I've come across are:

  • Mail app hogs memory. Here it's enough to quit and restart Mail.
  • Spotlight search in Mail causes issues with symptoms being that no more matching results are found. Then kill process corespotlightd (will restart automatically).
  • Using Sidecar causes process WindowServer to hog a lot of memory. Seems a reboot is required to fix this.
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