After Effects uses up almost all my computer's RAM and causes it to crash

[nathank67771579]

Every time I use After Effects, it gradually uses up all my computer's RAM. It also crashes other programs; blacks out the screen temporarily multiple times; or blacks out and freezes, which forces me to do a hard shutdown.  Is this due to an issue within my computer, or within After Effects?

Dell XPS 15 7590

NVIDIA GTX 1650 4 GB

Intel i7 9750H 6-Core

16 GB RAM

1 TB SSD

[Roland Kahlenberg]

16GB of RAM to run AE isn't much - it's the basic System Requirements for AE today. To help AE perform better, minimize the use of other applications, concurrently. If you're Web browsing, lessen the number of Opened Tabs. You will also want to experiment with the amount of RAM allocated to AE (and other apps) in AE's Preferences, in the Memory & Performance section.

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Good point from Andrew and Myleneiun. I forgot to specifically mention the GPU although this was alluded to when I touched on reducing the number of apps used concurrently with AE - these affect RAM as well as VRAM (GPU). So, ensure you have the latest or best-working drivers (there are occasions, although very uncommon, where the latest drivers may cause issues).

[Andrew Yoole]

In addition to Roland's great advice, the screen going black may imply an issue with your graphics processor.  Make sure you've installed all the latest OS and GPU driver updates.  Experiment with software-only rendering from the AE Preferences menu to see if it makes things better or worse.

[Mylenium]

Those are plain and clearly driver crashes. As @Andrew Yoole suggested, update your graphics driver, its settings and also check your hardware acceleration preferences. Same for cache settings and associated storage drivers for your SSD. Contrary to what @Roland Kahlenberg said, working memory is not the issue. This is simply not how this stuff works and 16 GB is still plenty unless you are working full 4k or 8k all the time...

Mylenium

[fnordware · Accepted solution]

Go into AE's memory preferences and increase the RAM reserved for other applications. If AE has permission to use a lot of RAM it might do that and your machine will start swapping.