Photoshop sat hogging memory while doing NOTHING

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

I can't reproduce this on my machine. So I think it isn't a general bug. Unfortunately you haven't given us any information about your system. Therefore, all proposed solutions are a look into the crystal ball.

Is your system up-to-date? Do you have installed all recent updates and patches for the operating system and the device drivers, especially the graphic driver. If you have a NVidia graphic card installed, make sure that you are using the recent Studio version of the driver, not the Game Ready version.

Please provide a copy of your 'System Info'. This can be get from the Photoshop menu item Help > System Info. There's a copy button in the System Info dialog. Press this button and paste the info into your next forum post.

Please post ALL information from first line down to and including Plug-in Info. All other infos after the Plug-in lines can be cut out. 

Have you had files open? Memory is not released until you close Photoshop. This is by design.

Is memory usage steadily increasing with no computer activity?

Show screenshots from Task Manager > Performance - the memory tab and the GPU tab.

Also the full Help > System Info.

Hey, @JasonBatley. Welcome to the Photoshop Community. I'll need more info to help you figure this out. Please share the system info from Photoshop Help > System info > Copy and paste into a text document > Upload and attach here.