September 22, 2026
ChatGPT on macOS 27 may crash: Astra finds a 14-year-old leak in libuv
On September 22, Astra linked ChatGPT crashes after the macOS 27 update to a roughly 14-year-old memory leak in libuv. In a reproduction on libuv 1.52.1, 64 persistent file watchers and 8 000 FSEventStream recreations increased process memory by 119,34 MiB, while the patch reduced the growth to 2,11 MiB. PR #5283 frees CFArray, CFString, and C buffers without changing libuv's public API or ABI.
Peter Steinberger 🦞
@steipete
After updating to macOS 27, ChatGPT sometimes crashed for me, and… Astra found a roughly 14-year-old bug in libuv. https://github.com/libuv/libuv/pull/5283
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ChatGPT began crashing after the macOS 27 update, but the cause lay below the chat app itself. Previously, sequentially closing N file watchers left N(N−1)/2 CFString instances unreleased.
The patch cleans up memory. On arm64, C-buffer leaks with 32, 64, and 128 watchers were 3 968, 16 128, and 65 024 bytes. libuv now frees these objects each time a watcher is recreated, so the old defect should no longer accumulate during long-running use.
The latest stable libuv v1.52.1 was released on March 6, while the fix currently exists only as the separate open PR #5283.
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