BearWidgets memory usage increases significantly over long uptime when using Sidebar widget

[Nicosalamone]

• Bear Version: 2.8.1 (14428)

• OS Version: macOS Sequoia 15.7.5 (Mac Studio M1 Max)

• What were you doing: My Mac is typically left running for many days without reboot. I use Bear daily and have two identical widgets enabled (one on the desktop and one in Notification Center).

• What feature did you use: Bear widget: “Sidebar” widget (“Barre latérale” in French), configured to display recently modified notes from sections such as Notes, To Do, Today, Untagged, or any tag.

• What happened: After several days of uptime, the “BearWidgets” process progressively increases its memory usage and eventually reaches very high levels (around 2.23 GB observed in the attached screenshot). This behavior has been happening consistently over several months, not just a one-time occurrence.

• What did you expect to happen: I expected the BearWidgets process to maintain stable memory usage over time, regardless of system uptime, or at least periodically release unused memory. It should not continuously grow to multi-GB usage under normal widget usage.

  Additional information:

  • This issue has been reproducible for several months

  • System uptime at time of issue: ~13 days 17 hours

  • Load averages at time of issue: 8.08, 7.27, 6.41

  • Only two widgets are active, both identical Sidebar widgets

  • The widget displays a small list of recently modified notes

    Screenshot:

    

[trix180]

I’m trying to replicate the issue. Is there any chance you are using the iOS widgets on macOS?
On Mac, the process name should be Bear Widgets, with a space.

[Nicosalamone]

Hi,

Thanks for looking into this.

I’m not using iOS widgets on macOS. These are the native macOS widgets that I added through the widget gallery: one on the desktop and one in Notification Center. Both are the same Sidebar widget.

Regarding the process name, that’s what surprised me as well. On my system, there is no process named Bear Widgets (with a space). The process is named BearWidgets (without a space) in Activity Monitor.

To verify what it actually is, I checked it with:

ps -o pid,ppid,comm -p <PID>

and it reports:

PID  PPID COMM
70094     1 /Applications/Bear.app/Contents/PlugIns/Bear Widgets Extension.appex/Contents/MacOS/Bear Widgets Extension

So it definitely appears to be Bear’s widget extension.

Also, since my original report, the memory usage has continued to grow. As of now:

• System uptime: 17 days, 2 hours
• BearWidgets memory usage: 3.12 GB (it was about 2.23 GB when I opened this report)

I’ve attached two new screenshots:

1. Activity Monitor showing BearWidgets using 3.12 GB of memory.
2. Terminal output showing the full executable path of the process.

Let me know if there’s any additional information or logs that would help diagnose the issue. I’m happy to provide them.