Upgrade StorageRead Aloud on macOS 27: MauiAUSP grows to tens of GB (speech synthesis memory leak)
# Problem
On Zotero 10.0.6 and macOS 27.0.1, while using Read Aloud with Ava (Premium), I often skip to the next sentence before the current one finishes. Each time I do, the system speech process MauiAUSP grows a bit more, and it never shrinks. After about a day of listening, the instance serving Zotero reached 28.7 GB and 472 threads, leaving my 48 GB Mac with 0.3 GB free. You can check it in Activity Monitor by searching for "AUSP".
This is a macOS 27 bug: every utterance stopped mid-sentence leaves a stuck job holding the voice model in memory (~145 MB each with Ava). Pausing, changing speed and other interruptions trigger it the same way. Sentences that finish normally don't leak.
# Proposed fix (PR: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/6071)
When Read Aloud cancels a sentence that is still playing, it kills the speech process if it has grown above 1 GB, then cancels as usual. macOS relaunches the process for the next sentence, with no noticeable delay. In my testing, the process now stays under ~1 GB instead of growing without bound.
Until then, quitting MauiAUSP in Activity Monitor or restarting Zotero frees the memory.
On Zotero 10.0.6 and macOS 27.0.1, while using Read Aloud with Ava (Premium), I often skip to the next sentence before the current one finishes. Each time I do, the system speech process MauiAUSP grows a bit more, and it never shrinks. After about a day of listening, the instance serving Zotero reached 28.7 GB and 472 threads, leaving my 48 GB Mac with 0.3 GB free. You can check it in Activity Monitor by searching for "AUSP".
This is a macOS 27 bug: every utterance stopped mid-sentence leaves a stuck job holding the voice model in memory (~145 MB each with Ava). Pausing, changing speed and other interruptions trigger it the same way. Sentences that finish normally don't leak.
# Proposed fix (PR: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/6071)
When Read Aloud cancels a sentence that is still playing, it kills the speech process if it has grown above 1 GB, then cancels as usual. macOS relaunches the process for the next sentence, with no noticeable delay. In my testing, the process now stays under ~1 GB instead of growing without bound.
Until then, quitting MauiAUSP in Activity Monitor or restarting Zotero frees the memory.