Your system has run out of application memory - Premiere Pro using 200GB

alexusmee wrote:

I've been trying to Media Manage a Prem Pro project (it has been ongoing for a couple of years—all audio files for a podcast) but I keep getting this memory warning and asked to force quit. The window says Premiere Pro is using 200GB of memory, which seems crazy? What's going on here? (screen grab below)

Recently updated to Ventura.

Alex

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/976c64cc-6245-419b-9da6-da5b0d287e14

MacBook Pro 16-inch 2021

M1 Max

32 GB memory

Ventura 13.4

693GB available (of 1TB)

see a post by BobHarris—

system has run out of application memory - Apple Community

If I were you I would dump Adobe Premiere and its subscription scheme and go with something like: https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/ and pay a one time fee that also can color film and export it back to Final Cut Pro to me is best of both Worlds!

There are 2 reasons for the "Your system has run out of application memory" dialog box.

A) Your boot disk has very low free storage, and macOS cannot create page/swap files to offload virtual memory contents to disk. This is generally not the case, but I mention this because if you do have very low free storage, it might apply. Depending on how much virtual memory is being called for, anything under 50-100GB of free storage may trigger the message.

Apple menu (upper left corner) -> About This Mac -> Storage (tab)

B) A process (or set of processes) has asked macOS for excessive amounts of virtual memory address space. Virtual memory address space requires macOS to create Virtual Memory Page Tables in non-pageable kernel address space to keep track of the application virtual addresses given out. Generally, if there is a memory leak (process asks for a virtual address range, uses the addresses, forgets to give them back, asks for another virtual address range, uses the addresses, forgets again, wash, rinse, repeat), eventually there are so many non-pageable virtual memory page table entries trying to keep track of the virtual addresses, that macOS no longer has memory available for applications, and you get the "Your system has run out of application memory"

If you look at

Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor -> View (menu) -> All Processes -> Memory (tab)

you can see what processes are using lots of memory. Many of these processes will NOT be applications. Just background agents and daemons used to provide many of the macOS services, as well as 3rd party background processes doing whatever that 3rd party app thinks it should be doing.

Also keep in mind that each web browser tab will be a separate process running its own Javascript. If you have lots of browser tabs open, or if one of the browser tabs running Javascript with a bug in it, it is possible these browser tabs will add up to a lot of virtual memory demands, but no individual tab will look all that big.

In this case it is very likely Adobe that is at fault. It is often rare that the list of offending apps actually shows the guilty party, but in this case it looks very much like Adobe has a memory leak, or you are editing some really huge files.