After Effects Using too much Memory
After Effects has used all of its memory doing nothing. This happens regardless of computer. Over 45GB ram used without a project file open.

After Effects has used all of its memory doing nothing. This happens regardless of computer. Over 45GB ram used without a project file open.

Windows 11. AE 2025. RTX 4060 8 GB VRAM. 64 GB CPU RAM.
After Effects will use as much memory as you give it. The more memory, the more rendered frames will stay in memory and faster playback. If you want to reduce memory usage, go into Preferences -> Memory & Performance and then set the memory available for non-Adobe apps to a higher amount. If you do that, make sure the Disk Cache is turned on and give it plenty of disk space. In 25.3+, AE will write those rendered frames to the disk cache and then use those for playback, reducing the amount of memory needed for AE to hold frames.
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