AE not using the memory I have permitted it to use

Thank you for the tip. It would be nice if the AE proxy system was enough to avoid loading the CH headless instance, but I don't think that's the case.

As mentioned in a similar issue you could export your CH projects as a video and import those into AE to avoid the creation of multiple CH headless processes.
Unfortunately your observation of each CH project import spinning up a new CH server is as expected and is something we need to improve on our side.

I'll also note that the allocations in AE's memory window don't match what my activity monitor says. It says 300-400MB are being used for each CA instance but AE says 100MB. This is shown in my attached screenshot. (As I type this it isn't clear whether that I'm replying to my first reply and not the original message) 

I think I've learned something. I think each application is actually doing the right thing. It's using less than or equal to the maximum memory allocated to it. Evidenced by the "max allowed memory" column. If you add up everything in that column, you indeed get 58GB. The problem is that most of these applications don't need anywhere near the amount that is allocated to them. Each Character Animator processes has 4+GB allocated but only seems to need 100MB. Given that I have 11 of those, and they are unnecessarily holding on a whopping 97% of the memory allocated to them. Oh no.

Also, After Effects has only 3.45GB allocated to it (which for some reason is less than what each CA instance gets) and it is using *more than the maxium* amount of memory. There are some serious problems here.