Apple M1 Ultra and Max both giving me low memory warnings

Project file

https://www.dropbox.com/t/C5xRHcJX14BDvz8B

Alight here is what I got...

Still looks like I have about 32 gigs of RAM not used. No FX. Just text, video, vectors, and 3D camera

Hi John,

Thanks so much for the fast response, I previously went through an interesting ordeal of trying to generate a support ticket while being part of a corporate license structure, which means you have to work through your vendor POC and that basically went nowhere.  I have a few problem projects that I can go back to and explore the effects being used.  I do recall that we had a project that would not render past a specific frame, so we ended up splitting it into 3-4 rendered parts and compiling it in Premiere.  But again, we have had this issue since before the native M1 support release, still had it after, and I just updated to ver23 and we are still having ram preview issues.  I did find a new symptom with the new release, in that if I did a memory purge using the cmd-opt-/ that it was working more effectively than doing the dropdown purge memory and cache.  This approach isn't providing consistent results though, as I just had another issue with only previewing 4 frames at a time and I had to restart to get the ram to reset.  This current project is definitely more dense than most of our others...so it's hard to say we used xyz effects, because the list is pretty long...but I now know how to generate that collect report only, so I will try to go back through and find the simplest project that gave us trouble and generate a report for it.  One question, it appears that the adobe documentation is suggesting higher RAM capacities in the help center...we are running on 16GB machines...are we just underequiped when it comes to RAM?  Thanks again, in advance, for any suggestions or insights you can provide.    

Hi @Seth23923769cu69,

Thanks for letting us know about this, sorry to hear that this has been such a frustrating issue for your team.

Are you still experiencing this in the latest 23.0 version of After Effects? If so, what effects are being used in the projects where this is occurring?

Thanks again for providing this feedback and for any further information you can provide, 

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

Hi John,

I am on a small team of motion designers and we have been having this low memory issue, along with crashes, across multiple M1 macbook pros for roughly the past 8+ months.  I have been trying to troubleshoot this issue and identify any commonalities with projects, but even extremely simple projects, a single comp with a few shape layers, are running into the low memory warnings with on 4 frames able to render.  That 4 frames is probably the only consistent behavior.  That and the fact that no amount of purging caches or cleaning databases fixes it.  You have to restart after effects to get it to "unlock" and even then there are times when the RAM usage found under "memory usage details" will show gigs of ram in use, but there should be little to no ram used.  I have tried adjusting 1) cache frames while idle 2) cache frames before playback 3) ram reserved for other apps 4)multiframe rendering 5) reduce cache size... 6) using the purge memory instead of purchase cache and memory...none of these has impacted the repeated memory lock that is occuring.  We are currently having to render timelines for preview, because we cannot preview them within ram.  Definitely not the optimal workflow.

Thanks,

Seth

Thanks for those details @motionbutton, much appreciated.

When you are shown the low RAM warning? E.g. right away on starting a project, or after working on one for a while? It sounds like RAM is being allocated but not released, but knowing the triggering condition will help us to reproduce the issue so we can get it fixed.

The next time you encounter the low memory warning, please use File > Dependencies > Collect Files... > Generate Report Only to generate a .txt file listing all effects used in your project and then share it here ( or DM me privately if you prefer ). This will help us know what footage and effects are being used and might be contributing to the problem. If possible, sharing the project file itself would also be helpful.

Thanks again for the additional info,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

This is on 23.0. Aka not fixed. Has been fully updated and still having this problem, 

Hi @motionbutton & @Ahmed26679961mm5q,

Thank you both for reporting this issue. Are you both using the latest After Effects 2023 (23.0) version released this week? There was a known issue involving low memory in After Effects 22.6, but there is a fix for it in 23.0.

If you are seeing the same low memory issues in 23.0, try updating any third-party plug-ins to their most recent version. Maxon/Red Giant has recently released updated plug-ins that were previously leaking large amounts of memory and would cause this error.

Thanks again,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

Yeah.. I was doing a simple vector logo animation, no FX, just trim lines and path animations last night, though it was in 4K. My previews should be eating that much ram. The actual render wasn't even a gig

i'm having the same issue with my m1 pro device, tried everything i can yet it still refuses to run properly