AE it's become a hell of a program

Thanks so much for providing the screen shot and taking time to help. Ill do another clean install and work my way through to see if i can find the problem causing the Ram to spike and crash AE. 

@DVSth 

I opened your project and it seems to work as I would expect.  Here's a screen recording: https://f.io/TTQV7Cdd

MacBook Pro 16-inch 2021

Apple M1 Max

32GB RAM

macOS Ventura 13.4.1

After Effects 2023 version 23.5

As inconvenient as it is to do so, you may need to do a clean install of macOS, Creative Cloud Desktop and After Effects.  Then run your project to test it, then add other software back, then test your project again.  As you go, hopefully you'l find whatever is causing the diminished performance.

Wow - I tried a clean install 😞 

My timeline is just peaking out with RAM and bogging down. I can't beleive this. I'll provide some screen shots in hopes you see something that might be doing wrong.

I tried your project and there's nothing that seems to concern me.  The timeline is nice and responsive.  It started rendering a preview after 10 secs of no use, which is normal, created a full res preview of the whole timeline in just over 30 seconds.  I rendered the item in your Render Queue (that had rendered for you in 38 seconds).  Mine took almost twice that, 1 min 9 secs.  Rendering to ProRes, rather than H264, made no difference to the render time.

I then transcoded your source video files from H264 to ProRes 422 and replaced them in the project.  This reduced the render time by 1 second - woo hoo!  The thinking is that Apple silicon has hardware encoders and decoders for ProRes - but it hasn't made a significant difference in this example.

But I'm not experiencing any unusual slowdowns, shutdowns or crashes, like you've suggested.  I'm not sure what else I can suggest, sorry, other than maybe a clean OS install?

Her is a link to the Google Drive Project Files  

Okay, good idea - I'll do google drive 👍

Sorry, no option to upload a project file to the threas so I thought I would provide some details. 

My Spec's are as follows: MBPro M2 Max
96 GB of RAM 
4TB Internal 
macOS Ventura 13.4.1

Using AE (Version 23.5.0 Build 52) for 2D work basically, using animator for text in a 1920x1080 Comp and that's about it. AE is absorbing 87/ 92% of my RAM - CPU isn't even being touched really and its extrememly slow chugging throuhg the timeline trying to get through rendering the green bars for simple annimations using tracking and opacity. Its crazy how slow it is. 

I took the same project over to my 13 years old pc - and its didn't even flinch. Blew through the the renders like nothing. 

Side Note for AE Settings are as followed: 
Media & Disk Cache settings are: 
Maximum Dish Cache Size: 100GB 

Memory & Performace 
Installed Ram 96GB
RAM reserved for other applications: 25GB
RAM acailable for AE: 71GB 
:ballot_box_with_check: Enable Multi-Frame Rendering 
% CPU Reserved for other applications 21% 

Project Settings: 
Mercury Software Only 

Using: Open Rosetta is un-checked. 

Cache frames when idle is also un-checked 

Preview is set to Half 

Hope this provides some insight. 

That's very strange.  I don't get the attachment dialog in this thread either, but you can see the OP posted an attachment, and I can still post attachemnts in other threads.  I wonder if there's a file size limitation per thread?  Anyway, in the meantime, can you maybe post a Dropbox, Google Drive  or WeTransfer link?

I've tried several different browsers - still can't find the option to upload a project file. 

I actually don't have an option in the tool bar above to attach files to the thread... the most I can post is a photo... Am i missing something or looking in the wrong place? 

Thanks for offering to help.