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System run out of application memory

Hi all,

I've been receiving the 'System has run out of application memory' message constantly all of a sudden on my Air M1 8GB. Despite the fact that I only have FireFox open and anywhere from 7-15 tabs.

Before a week ago, I would be able to have numerous applications open and lots of tabs and had never seen this message before.


I've ran an EtreCheck but am unable to make sense of it all.

I'll copy it below. If anyone has the time could they please give me their thoughts on what might be causing the issue and how to rectify it. Also should I be worried about kernel panics?

Thanks in advance for any help!


MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.2

Posted on Sep 13, 2024 1:39 PM

Reply
5 replies

Sep 13, 2024 2:17 PM in response to britishpain

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. 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 -> More Info... -> Storage (scroll down a bit) -> Storage Settings... B. A process (or set of processes) has asked macOS for excessive amounts of virtual memory address space. In order to keep track of the virtual memory address space, the kernel creates virtual memory page tables. If there is a memory leak (process asks for a virtual address range, forgets to give it back, asks for another range, forgets again, wash, rinse, repeat), eventually there are so many page tables created there is no memory left for applications, and you get the "Your system has run out of applications memory". 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 be background agents and daemons used to provide many of the macOS services, as well as your applications. 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.

Sep 14, 2024 7:11 AM in response to britishpain

It sure looks like a Firefox problem. There's an easy way to test this. Restart. Then use Safari. If you don't experience the problem, then you've identified the cause.


You should probably also update your operating system. I can understand people not wanting to run whatever the latest, buggiest version of the operating system might be (Sonoma today, Sequoia in two days). But there's no reason to run an old version of Ventura. At least update to the latest version of Ventura.

Sep 14, 2024 6:25 PM in response to britishpain

This part from the Kernel Panic log seems like it may be a hardware issue:

 panic(cpu 4 caller 0xfffffe0012bba74c): "i2c3::_checkBusStatus SCL is
            stuck low;


For the extreme memory consumption, a web browser would be most likely the source of the problem since 17GB of Swap has been used which is excessive.

System run out of application memory

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