RAM Reserved: "Pending" (and Memory Leak)

[hyper_vlk]

Hello,

I am unfortunately unable to change any RAM preferences in the Memory & Performance settings. I have 128 GB of RAM installed. The option for "RAM reserved for other applications" is greyed out - says "~ GB (Pending)".

This came after having updated my After Effects version to 2025.4 after experiencing unmanageable memory leaks in previous versions. All on Windows 10. I've updated my GPU driver, started in Safe Mode, disabled third-party plugins and extensions.

Regarding the Memory Leak - the smallest operations cause memory to go up and never be freed.

To reproduce: new 8bpc project, 1080p Comp, created a white solid and moved it's position around in the comp preview window. After about a minute or so, After Effects is at 20GB RAM usage. Not something I can work with.

Turned off GPU acceleration, Multi-Frame Rendering, cleared Media & Disk Cache. "dvacore.dll" seems to be allocating. Having made snapshots before & after the Leak with VMMap revealed identical allocation aside from hundreds or thousands of private memory blocks sized 22,016 K. They never get freed. My RAM itself is healthy.

I'd like to have at least the option to set my RAM allocation for After Effects back. I am paying money for a product I cannot use. I'd appreciate any help!

[RobShultz]

Can you give us more system specs?

Is there a reason why you haven't upgraded to Windows 11?

[hyper_vlk]

Hi!

Sure thing.

There's older software involved in my workflow that simply isn't compatible with Windows 11. I have Windows 10 ver 22H2, which is listed as compatible.

I've got an Intel i9 12900K, GeForce RTX 3090, 128GB of RAM.

[jenkmeister]

If you're unable to adjust the memory setting, please restart your computer, and the after AE starts up, make sure the dynamic link manager process starts up. The pending ~GB shows when AE can't find the dynamic link manager to know how the RAM is allocated. 

As to the memory leak, AE is likely caching your comp for you. If you don't want that, go to Composition -> Preview -> and turn off Cache Frames While Idle.