After Effects Using too much Memory

[default24453284pwmocl]

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

[jenkmeister]

Do you have third-party plugins installed? Are you using AE 23.5? 

[default24453284pwmocl]

Every version I have used for the past two years including 23.5. I have had it occur with and without the one plugin I have installed GoPro FX Reframe. 

[jenkmeister]

Any chance you're able to screen record AE + the Task Manager from before AE starts up until it eats up the 45GB RAM so we can see what you're experiencing? 

[default24453284pwmocl]

Like nearly every issue I have faced in After Effects, it is intermitten. It would be impractical to record until it happens.

[default24453284pwmocl]

I stopped working on a comp, grabbed a drink and came back to errors about memory. DOING NOTHING other then having a small file open 

 

[jenkmeister]

Do you have Cache Frames When Idle enabled? 

I don't see any errors on the screenshots you posted. Were there specific errors, or just task manager indicating high memory usage? 

[default24453284pwmocl]

There were out of memory errors. I did have cache frames when idle, however this occurs when not idle and the memory is not freed up after closing the project.

[default24453284pwmocl]

More goofy memory problems.. Running out of memory while using less then half.

[default24453284pwmocl]

Even more fun with memory. I have an entire drive dedicated to cache, with a limit of 500gb in adobe settings. Not even 400gb used (shared with premiere) but I am receiving out of memory errors.

[jenkmeister]

I'll have another engineer look at the RAM issue with you. 

The Disk Cache one seems correct though. You're wanting to use up to 500GB but the drive shows only 433GBs of space available. Unclear from the images how much of that drive is already filled with AE cache files (that are active for the current version of AE) but assuming it's none of that, then you'd need ~500GBs free before putting any cache files on disk. 

[marceloalmeidabr]

Try this!

Edit - Preferences - Memory and change RAM reserved for other applications: 27 gb

I did this and it seems to have improved a lot if you use 90% or more of memory your computer will be very slow and you need to have some left over to be able to work better.

[default24453284pwmocl]

I went to clear the cache, it gave a warming that i was about to clear 369 gb of cache. so that used portion is AE only. I bought a harddrive just for cache. If  I am not mistaken 500 as a limit with 369 used leave 131 GB remaining for cache. That is a substantial amount of  memory to have available but be getting a message about being out of memory.

[nishu_kush]

Can you install the latest version of After Effects and see if the issue persists?

Let us know. I am moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for now.

Thanks,

Nishu

[lauren_0099]

I'm having the same issue!!! i dont understand. i have a video that's literally less than 5 seconds long and it can't fully play it without glitching out and replaying the same 0.02 seconds. buying the creative cloud literally was the worst mistake ever having a computer with only 16 GB of ram storage. 

[philipps65380953]

Seems this topic is two years old, and nobody has a solution. What is going on here,... I am having the same problem, and whatever I tried in the last two months didn't help anything. Also I reinstalled everything, disabled plugins and bought an external harddrive extra for AEs incredible RAM usage. Is there any help here?

[nishu_kush]

Could you let us know your system specifications (CPU, GPU, RAM, OS version) and version of After Effects? Are there any third-party plug-ins installed? Does it happen with all the projects or a particular one?

Thanks,
Nishu

[marceloalmeidabr]

Update to 2025 is much better, it's still not a dream but much better, there's still a lot to improve but it's better than 2024.

[cced_user]

I opened a new project today and Adobe AE is using 23GB RAM! I have 64GB total RAM installed but 23GB RAM for a small project seems really bad.

[cced_user]

I do not have any plugins installed

[cced_user]

Windows 11. AE 2025. RTX 4060 8 GB VRAM. 64 GB CPU RAM.

[jenkmeister · Accepted solution]

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. 

[cced_user]

thanks for the clarification