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Ketrinz
Participating Frequently
March 7, 2012
Question

Re: InDesign CS5 Out of memory error on a new imac with 16GB RAM

  • March 7, 2012
  • 6 replies
  • 48435 views

I have iMac 16GB ram. I get the out of memory reasonably often. I have font management, mainly Adobe apps open and Word. I work with magazines, so around 36 - 48 pages. Save As doesn't do anything for this problem (yes it is a good practice and it is good to regularly do this). Saving to InDesign Markup doesn't alleviate this problem. Also it doesn't seem changing preferences for Live Screen Drawing works. I find mine has got worse since installing Lion, but I have also had this problem since CS5 - I can't remember if it happened in CS4. Currently I have 4GB RAM spare but InDesign thinks otherwise. It drives me mad. Keep complaining and please Adobe do something about this one, there are a number of people complaining.
By the way anyone that solves this problem on the forum should get a prize from Adobe.

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    6 replies

    K
    KetrinzAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    August 7, 2012

    Try turning off your Preflight and just turn it on to do your checks. Preflight mainly just causes crashes when you import some Word documents. Mine was fixed with the background tasks. Have since upgraded to CS6 and no problems using background tasks. Good luck.

    H
    HAYMAN DESIGN
    Participant
    August 7, 2012

    Sadly turing off the preflight was to no avail.

    Getting a failed to export the file now.

    K
    KetrinzAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    August 7, 2012

    So sorry - it's a pain isn't it.

    It sounds so like my background task problem. I would start seeing if it only happens in that one document. Or have you installed other software (other than Lion) that might be conflicting. Just looking at an earlier post. When I installed Lion - I had some font problems. ie Helvetica. Good luck

    S
    Schinde
    Participant
    May 27, 2012

    It's crazy... I'm working on a catalog and I keep getting the out of memory message (Indesign V7.5). I wish Adobe would fix this in the next update. I also am still having packaging problems in Indesign using helvetivca. At this stage of CS5.5, I shouldn't have to go back to CS4 to get the job done. This is why I am hesitant to use Cloud for software - I need to go back to previous versions to complete my work. Has anyone found a solution yet?

    K
    KetrinzAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    May 27, 2012

    I have since stopped the PDF from creating in background and have had no problems since. For instructions check out. http://indesignsecrets.com/a-new-workaround-for-that-pesky-background-export-issue.php

    H
    HAYMAN DESIGN
    Participant
    August 7, 2012

    I have the same issue but disabling the background did not help. Still get out of memory and there is plenty there in both physical and GPU memory.

    Any further ideas?

    A
    Anonymous
    March 14, 2012

    Hi Guys, I've also started having this problem, but I've found out something that you might have missed.

    It's not system memory that it's out of, it's video memory.

    I've got iStat menus installed and one of the handy statistics that this displays is the GPU's memory usage, every time I got this error the GPU memory usage was full.

    Unfortunately it doesn't tell you what is using the video memory, but I don't think it's specifically an Indesign problem, as the GPU usage is rather high just sat idling at desktop. Something in the system is either leaking memory, or not freeing it up once it's no longer needed.

    John Hawkinson
    John Hawkinson
    Inspiring
    March 14, 2012

    DeM0B: Interesting, can you include a screenshot?

    I am a bit skeptical, because my understanding is that InDesign makes no use of the GPU. This understanding comes with a 75% confidence factor, so it could easily be wrong.

    I know very little about GPU instrumentation, though. But surely this will depend on your GPU. So what GPU, what graphics card, and perhaps most importantly, how much VRAM?

    Also, what other potential GPU-using apps are running simultaneously? Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Final Cut, CAD software, etc.?

    These are questions for both Ketrinz and DeM0B.

    K
    KetrinzAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    March 14, 2012

    Hi John - I only run Photoshop out of that selection. I am hoping it was the background tasks for me. I was having an issue running slow yesterday and then all of a sudden InDesign took off and worked well. I will check it out if it happens again. I forgot to see if my auto backup was working at the time. Otherwise I will have to establish what background tasks are happening that I don't know about. I do usually have a lot of apps open while working Photoshop, Bridge, Illustrator, Mail, Acrobat and Word. I am keeping more of an eye on my memory at the moment. Just a question re Activity Monitor: if I am low on the Free memory Green, does the Inactive memory Blue kick in. My understanding is that Inactive memory is for recent tasks that they can kick into this area again and re-establish the currently used memory. So far so good though - no out of memory issues.

    K
    KetrinzAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    March 9, 2012

    Sorry John - I was rushing when I wrote this input. I disabled the background tasks today. That has only just been done and yes I restarted.

    The out of memory messages were from yesterday.

    Will not be setting until Monday now, so I will work IND hard then and see what happens. Thanks again

    K
    KetrinzAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    March 8, 2012

    Thanks so much John - didn't know about disabling background tasks. That is now done. I did get an out of memory message straight afterwards, but went into Terminal and pasted info but did not work. Was on my way out and in a hurry, so probably me.

    We'll see how this goes. Thank you so so much for your input.

    Will read your next instructions properly shortly. I have never noticed IND using more than 2 GB ram but will keep an eye on that.

    John Hawkinson
    John Hawkinson
    Inspiring
    March 8, 2012

    Thanks so much John - didn't know about disabling background tasks. That is now done. I did get an out of memory message straight afterwards

    Did you restart InDesign after doing disabling background exports and before getting the memory message?

    but went into Terminal and pasted info but did not work. Was on my way out and in a hurry, so probably me.

    Huh. Well, please do feel free to try it anytime InDesign is running even when it's not broken. The details of the output won't be interesting to me, but if it fails to give you a few pages of output, hopefully it will give you an error message you can post here.

    John Hawkinson
    John Hawkinson
    Inspiring
    March 8, 2012

    (would someone care to branch this thread?)

    Ketrinz:

      Do you have a reproducible test case? That's a great thing to have. It sonuds like happens often to you.

    You don't specify what version you're using; please do be explicit -- hold down Command and select About InDesign and you'll get four decimal digits. Also, how often is "reasonably often"? How many times/day during what sort of work?

    16GB of RAM isn't directly helpful. Because InDesign is a 32-bit application, it can never use more than 4GB of RAM.

    Ironically (for me), we have been seeing a similar problem infrequently, I think three instances this calendar year. It has been difficult to track down, and I haven't been able to get good information from Adobe Developer Support on how to track down the memory usage of different parts of InDesign, somewhat to my frustration.

    When you next encounter this, in addition to the summary information from Activity Monitor I ask for above, you can try opening Terminal.app and enter: vmmap -wide "Adobe InDesign"

    Save the output and upload it to http://pastebin.com/ and post a link here. It may help to give us some idea of what is going on (but it may not).

    What Font Management software are you using? Does any of it use InDesign plugins? Can you try temporarily disabling those plugins?

    I assume you've not discused the problem with Adobe Support?

    K
    KetrinzAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    March 8, 2012

    Thank you so much for answering John.

    Today I am having so much trouble, at least 10 messages, tried quitting InDesign no joy. I have just rebooted, so we will see how it goes. I wonder if there is a correlation between the background tasks i.e. creating a PDF, that happened today as well.

    I am using system 7.0.4.553

    and InD 10.7.3.

    I used to have "out of memory" message infrequently, but it has just bumped up significantly recently.

    I have just installed Drop Box. I don't know of any issues with that.

    IND just hung again when trying to create a PDF. Stopping the background tasks never works - so it is a force quit. Will let you know if it goes out of memory again.

    Cheers

    Cheryl

    Rik Ramsay
    Rik Ramsay
    Participating Frequently
    March 8, 2012

    I used to have a lot of similar problems when creating documents with lots of text and large images - similar to a magazine. I managed to speed up InD by turning off the 'Live Preflight' which helped significantly. Any live spell checking etc can also slow it down.

    Are you placing the images at actual size or are you bringing in larger images and then scaling down inside InD? This can seriously affect the size of the InD file and will lead to it 'running out of memory' as it tries to render the content - especially if you view in High Quality Display.

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