Illustrator Using Excessive Memory on M4 Mac Mini Causing "System Has Run Out of Application Memory" Error

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
May 21, 2025
1 reply
278 views

What is going on. with Ilustrator? I'm on the latest version of Illustrator and the Mac OS, on a barnd new M4 Mac MIni and apparantly Illustrator is using 149GB of memory! This is happening all the time. Does anyone know what I can do about this?

Performance

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @richardesignerUK,

Thanks for reaching out. That sounds really frustrating, especially on such a powerful new Mac Mini! To help troubleshoot, could you please confirm the exact versions of Illustrator and macOS you're using? Also, does the high memory usage happen right when you launch Illustrator, or only after opening a document? If it's with a document, does it occur with all files or just a specific one?

Please try resetting Illustrator's preferences, but be sure to back up your preferences before doing so. Here's how: https://adobe.ly/438BDan. After resetting, check if the memory usage improves.

Also, try running the system in Safe Mode and test with a new local admin user account to rule out system- or user-specific issues. Here are the references:

https://adobe.ly/43qIudY
https://adobe.ly/4mwgHSm

Let me know how it goes or if anything changes after trying these steps.

I'm here to help and look forward to your update!

Abhishek

R

richardesignerUKAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Abhishek,

This is still happening. I left my Mac Mini the other day and came back to see this on my screen. Unfortunately I wasnt able to save any of my open files as I literally had to force quite everything to get my Mac working again (had to do a restart). What is going on? I’m on a M4 Mac mini (2024) with 24GB memory. Using Tahoe 26.3.1 and Illustrator 30.2.1.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @richardesignerUK,

Sorry to hear that you still experience this issue. Thanks for sharing the system details.

Could you please check if Illustrator and the Creative Cloud Desktop app have Full Disk Access enabled on your Mac? You can do this by going to System Settings, then going to Privacy & Security and selecting Full Disk Access. Click the lock icon to authenticate, then use the + button to add Illustrator and Creative Cloud Desktop if they are not already listed. After adding them, restart the Mac and check if the issue improves.

If it still happens, please try reinstalling the Creative Cloud components. Close all Adobe apps, then remove the Creative Cloud Desktop app, CCLibrary, and CoreSync using the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool: https://adobe.ly/4mkYJCc. After that, reinstall the Creative Cloud Desktop app from https://adobe.ly/43fQrCS and relaunch Illustrator.

Let me know how it goes, and I will be happy to look into it further.

Abhishek

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