Memory management issue

This may or may not be relevant to your issue, but I discovered some things while troubleshooting yesterday that I strongly suspect have been a major cause for the sluggishness & memory usage I've been experiencing. These steps have so far mostly sent memory usage back down to normal levels (been less than 24hrs). These may be Mac-specific, and for context I’m on 27.7 but leaving this here in case others are dealing with the same.

1. Despite having reset preferences multiple times over the last few months & years, and despite having ran Adobe Cleaner + uninstalled + reinstalled all Adobe apps, there were a number of very old/obsolete Adobe files on my system.
   1. Obsolete files in /Users/Shared: This contains the folders: Adobe, AdobeGCData, AdobeGCInfo, NGL. I deleted /Users/Shared/Adobe/NGL/.VU1JUmFuZG9tR3VpZEluY2FybmF0aW9u.dat and /Users/Shared/NGL/.VU1JUmFuZG9tR3VpZA.dat
   2. Obsolete hidden files in ~/Library/Application Support: The "last modified" dates on these ranged from 2022 to 2025. They included: .ACCC_Lock, .ADCS_Lock, .CCH_GrowthSDKHelper_Lock, .CCH_NGLW_Lock, CCH_UpdateNotifier_Lock, .CCH_UPI_Lock, COSY_Lock. I deleted all of these.
2. Despite having granted full disk access to Creative Cloud, Illustrator, Indesign, and Photoshop, it seems Creative Cloud and/or associated apps did not have the permissions they wanted, and so were stuck in some kind of feedback loop where they made continuous failed attempts to reach Adobe servers. I am very opposed to granting so many far-reaching permissions, however I did methodically grant additional permissions to every possible Adobe app to try to resolve these issues. I granted the below permissions to any Adobe apps/services that weren't already added.
   1. Full Disk Access
   2. App Management
   3. Local Network

Hi, thanks for reaching out! 

If you are still experiencing the same behavior, please go to the Help menu in Photoshop, then System Info, and copy the text. You can share the info with us by either pasting it as a reply here or in a text file and sharing the file with us. 

You can try optimizing the preferences of Photoshop using the steps suggested here: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

Also, check if Photoshop is added to Full Disk Access and has permissions to Files and Folders. You can check out the steps here: 

Let us know how it goes! 

Thanks, 

Nikunj 

Is  there any masking or other advanced AI/GPU-based processing involved? Many of these functions will cause the GPU to use huge amounts of shared system memory, sometimes causing the whole system to choke. This is outside Photoshop's own internal memory management.

We're still talking about suboptimal and buggy behavior, but happening mainly in the interface between application/operating system.

In many cases, a complete reset of preferences fixes these GPU memory drain situations, so that's always worth a shot.