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default24453284pwmocl
Participating Frequently
July 28, 2023
Answered

After Effects Using too much Memory

After Effects has used all of its memory doing nothing. This happens regardless of computer. Over 45GB ram used without a project file open. 

 

 

    jenkmeister17177426Correct answer
    September 19, 2025

    Windows 11. AE 2025. RTX 4060 8 GB VRAM. 64 GB CPU RAM.


    After Effects will use as much memory as you give it. The more memory, the more rendered frames will stay in memory and faster playback. If you want to reduce memory usage, go into Preferences -> Memory & Performance and then set the memory available for non-Adobe apps to a higher amount. If you do that, make sure the Disk Cache is turned on and give it plenty of disk space. In 25.3+, AE will write those rendered frames to the disk cache and then use those for playback, reducing the amount of memory needed for AE to hold frames. 

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    24 replies

    XNT
    Participant
    March 31, 2026

    Ae is a shit to ram memory

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    cced_user
    Participant
    September 19, 2025

    I opened a new project today and Adobe AE is using 23GB RAM! I have 64GB total RAM installed but 23GB RAM for a small project seems really bad.

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    cced_user
    Participant
    September 19, 2025

    I do not have any plugins installed

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    cced_user
    Participant
    September 19, 2025

    Windows 11. AE 2025. RTX 4060 8 GB VRAM. 64 GB CPU RAM.

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    philipps65380953
    Participating Frequently
    June 3, 2025

    Seems this topic is two years old, and nobody has a solution. What is going on here,... I am having the same problem, and whatever I tried in the last two months didn't help anything. Also I reinstalled everything, disabled plugins and bought an external harddrive extra for AEs incredible RAM usage. Is there any help here?

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      nishu_kush
      nishu_kush
      Legend
      June 6, 2025

      Could you let us know your system specifications (CPU, GPU, RAM, OS version) and version of After Effects? Are there any third-party plug-ins installed? Does it happen with all the projects or a particular one?


      Thanks,
      Nishu

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      lauren_0099
      Participant
      December 27, 2024

      I'm having the same issue!!! i dont understand. i have a video that's literally less than 5 seconds long and it can't fully play it without glitching out and replaying the same 0.02 seconds. buying the creative cloud literally was the worst mistake ever having a computer with only 16 GB of ram storage. 

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        nishu_kush
        nishu_kush
        Legend
        June 1, 2024

        Can you install the latest version of After Effects and see if the issue persists?

        Let us know. I am moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for now.

         

        Thanks,

        Nishu

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        default24453284pwmoclAuthor
        Participating Frequently
        August 19, 2023

        I went to clear the cache, it gave a warming that i was about to clear 369 gb of cache. so that used portion is AE only. I bought a harddrive just for cache. If  I am not mistaken 500 as a limit with 369 used leave 131 GB remaining for cache. That is a substantial amount of  memory to have available but be getting a message about being out of memory.

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          Community Manager
          jenkmeister17177426Community Manager
          August 18, 2023

          I'll have another engineer look at the RAM issue with you. 

           

          The Disk Cache one seems correct though. You're wanting to use up to 500GB but the drive shows only 433GBs of space available. Unclear from the images how much of that drive is already filled with AE cache files (that are active for the current version of AE) but assuming it's none of that, then you'd need ~500GBs free before putting any cache files on disk. 

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          marceloalmeidabr
          marceloalmeidabr
          Known Participant
          July 25, 2024

          Try this!

          Edit - Preferences - Memory and change RAM reserved for other applications: 27 gb

           

          I did this and it seems to have improved a lot if you use 90% or more of memory your computer will be very slow and you need to have some left over to be able to work better.

           

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            default24453284pwmoclAuthor
            Participating Frequently
            August 18, 2023

            Even more fun with memory. I have an entire drive dedicated to cache, with a limit of 500gb in adobe settings. Not even 400gb used (shared with premiere) but I am receiving out of memory errors.

             

             

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              default24453284pwmoclAuthor
              Participating Frequently
              August 18, 2023

              More goofy memory problems.. Running out of memory while using less then half.

               

               

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              default24453284pwmoclAuthor
              Participating Frequently
              August 8, 2023

              There were out of memory errors. I did have cache frames when idle, however this occurs when not idle and the memory is not freed up after closing the project.

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