After Effects 2025 causes 100% RAM and 100% Disk usage immediately on launch

[MattwellsFilms]

I’m experiencing a severe performance issue with After Effects 2025 on Windows:
as soon as I open the program, RAM and Disk usage instantly jump to 100%, even with an empty project.

This happens with:

• No project loaded

• A blank project

• Only one empty composition

• Clean installation of AE

• No plugins installed (fresh install)

The program becomes unusable and the entire system slows down heavily.

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1. Main symptoms

:pushpin: RAM → 95–100% usage immediately

• After Effects alone consumes nearly all of my 32 GB RAM

• Even without any project, layers, effects, or media

• Windows becomes slow after opening AE

:pushpin: Disk → 80–100% usage

• Disk usage spikes to the maximum

• Stops only after killing Adobe background processes, but RAM remains maxed out

• After Effects sometimes locks the NVMe at constant high read/write usage (70–100 MB/s)

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2. Adobe background processes involved

These processes reopen automatically even after being closed:

• Adobe Dynamic Link Manager 2025

• Adobe TeamProjectsLocalHub 2025

• Creative Cloud Interprocess Service (32-bit)

However, they do not use much RAM or disk, so they are probably not the direct cause — the main AE process is.

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3. Hardware (so it’s NOT a weak PC problem)

• 32 GB RAM

• 1 TB NVMe SSD (350 GB free)

• Windows 10/11 updated

• Latest After Effects 2025

Any basic AE project should run normally on this machine.

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4. What I’ve already tried (full checklist)

✔ Full clean reinstall of After Effects

• Uninstalled completely

• Deleted all leftover folders from:

  • %appdata%/Adobe/After Effects

  • %localappdata%/Adobe/After Effects

  • %appdata%/Adobe/Common

  • %localappdata%/Adobe/Common

✔ Reset all preferences

✔ Cleared all media cache

✔ Disabled Multi-Frame Rendering

✔ Disabled hardware acceleration

✔ Tried launching with “-nogpu”

AE says the argument is invalid.

✔ Manually set Windows pagefile

• Initial: 4096

• Max: 16384

Restarted after changes.

✔ Closed all Adobe processes via Task Manager

✔ Clean boot (no external programs running)

✔ Checked for malware / suspicious processes

Nothing unusual detected.

Still the same problem:

RAM instantly hits 100%, Disk stays near 100% until secondary services are manually closed.

[Warren Heaton]

Have your tried using Effects Manager to disable all third-party plugins?

[MattwellsFilms]

Yes i did, its happening with a fresh new install. No third party plugins.

[MattwellsFilms]

So no one know what is this?

[Warren Heaton]

@MattwellsFilms 

I am not able to reproduce the issue that you are having with RAM usage and I think I am on a similar configuration.

My system info:
Application: After Effects v25.6.0.101
OS: Windows v10.0.26200, RAM: 31.64 GB GB, CPUs (logical): 20

When I launch After Effects, RAM usage remains more or less the same while the app is initially opened.  When I start to work, I am not seeing nothing unexpected.

Maybe @JohnColombo can provide some further troubleshooting suggestions.

- Warren

. 

[JohnColombo]

Hi @MattwellsFilms,

What you're experiencing certainly isn't typical. A log file from After Effects might help us figure out what's causing the resource usage. Please follow these steps to create a log file:

1. Open After Effects
2. Choose Help > Enable Logging (restart when prompted)
3. Create an empty composition (as you described)
4. Quit After Effects
5. In Windows Explorer, open this location: C:\Users\<yourUserName>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\25.6\logs 
   
   Please share the After Effects Log.txt from that logs folder. It will contain some file path information, so feel free to send a link in a DM to keep that information private. Please let us know in this thread if you've sent a DM.
   
   Thank you for reporting this issue,
   - John, After Effects Engineering Team