AE not using the memory I have permitted it to use

Report · Aug 14, 2023

New macbook with 64GB ram and an M2 Pro chip. I have, in the settings, permitted it to use all but 6GB.

I'm using AE+Premiere+Audition+Character Animator via dynamic link. I've got a handful of Ch headless processes (11 @ 200MB memory each), After effects with 4.3GB, Premiere with 1GB, and Audition with 600MB. You can do the math if you like, but my system RAM is only half used according to Activity Monitor (35GB across all active processes, not just adobe stuff). Nevertheless, AE is giving me a low memory warning and struggling to load previews. What's going on?

I'm running AE and PR 23.5.0 and AU 23.6.0.61.

In the "max allowed memory" category of AE's memory profiler it says ~4.5GB when Audition is open. Why is that? That seems like the root of the problem. When Audition is NOT open it goes up to 13GB which is still wrong. This also seems to create some dynamic link problems in Audition where the video just refuses to stay updated unless I reopen Audition. It's super exhausting trying to use this software considering my computer has more than enough resources.

Some discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AfterEffects/comments/15ofsda/ae_not_using_the_memory_i_have_permitted_it_t...?

Report · Aug 14, 2023

I think I've learned something. I think each application is actually doing the right thing. It's using less than or equal to the maximum memory allocated to it. Evidenced by the "max allowed memory" column. If you add up everything in that column, you indeed get 58GB. The problem is that most of these applications don't need anywhere near the amount that is allocated to them. Each Character Animator processes has 4+GB allocated but only seems to need 100MB. Given that I have 11 of those, and they are unnecessarily holding on a whopping 97% of the memory allocated to them. Oh no.

Also, After Effects has only 3.45GB allocated to it (which for some reason is less than what each CA instance gets) and it is using *more than the maxium* amount of memory. There are some serious problems here.

Report · Aug 14, 2023

I'll also note that the allocations in AE's memory window don't match what my activity monitor says. It says 300-400MB are being used for each CA instance but AE says 100MB. This is shown in my attached screenshot. (As I type this it isn't clear whether that I'm replying to my first reply and not the original message)

Report · Aug 14, 2023

As mentioned in a similar issue you could export your CH projects as a video and import those into AE to avoid the creation of multiple CH headless processes.
Unfortunately your observation of each CH project import spinning up a new CH server is as expected and is something we need to improve on our side.

Report · Aug 15, 2023

Thank you for the tip. It would be nice if the AE proxy system was enough to avoid loading the CH headless instance, but I don't think that's the case.