Massive memory leak in After Effects 2022 causes system instability & lockups

Report · Jan 30, 2022

Latest versions of After Effects 2022 and 2021 are causing system instability, using up 58GB of RAM and then freezing the entire computer even when the software is just idling in the background. There is a huge memory leak that no one is able to discover and "turning off multi frame rendering" does nothing to help the issue.

But I found a fix! I reverted to 2020 and now everything is working perfectly again. It's the exact same old after effects experience: slow, laggy, no real-time playback, except its 100 times better because it doesnt crash my entire system after 2 minutes of use.

Just a quick note, you have to directly contact Adobe using the support "Chat" to ask them to give you an installer file for AdobeAfterEffects17AllTrial and AdobeMediaEncoder14AllTrial and youll need AdobePremierePro14AllTrial if you want to be able to use dynamic link between Premiere still.

Have fun everyone! Maybe Adobe will one day fix the software we pay hundreds of pounds for yearly... I doubt it but who knows. Until then, ill just run software written two years ago.

Report · Sep 20, 2023

Same issue happens to me, it goes up to 99% of my RAM usage, doing nothing or previewing simple scenes... Any fix?

Report · Sep 20, 2023

Go to 'composition' < 'preview' and turn of the 'Cache Frames when Idle' function.

Hope it helps! 🙂

Report · Sep 20, 2023

This was mentitioned several times in thread already. It isn't the solution for this particular problem and did not change the memory leak and crashing issue.

Report · Sep 26, 2023

Ok I have noticed that if I set the render engine to "software only" my ram usage doesn't spike up to MAX of my 256GB of ram and the render is overall more stable. Something in the pipeline with GPU rendereing is not playing well.

Other thing I've noticed is that cached frames render 2x as fast with GPU turned off which also tells me something is pooly optimized.

I haven't updated to the September 2023 Studio Drivers yet but my guess is they wont fix this.

Report · Oct 17, 2023

Same issue withn '23 for me.
Filling 110GB worth of RAM within 10 mins on larger projetcs. Need to purge ram before every preview on some.
Not using any third party plugins on the particularly bad project that brought me here - but by all means Warren please tell me I don't have enough RAM and it's third party plugins to blame.

Report · Oct 17, 2023

Cache frames when idle is unchecked in my circumstance, FWIW

Report · Oct 18, 2023

In a project with longer Comps at higher frame sizes with the project Color Bit Depth set to 16 bits per channel, I'd worry If 110GB was available and After Effects wasn't using it.

In your Composition Settings (Composition> Composition Settings), how much memory is After Effects telling you is needed per frame at Full Resolution?

What is shown in the Memory Details (Settings > Memory & Performance > Memory > Show Memory Usage Details > Memory Details)?

When viewing the Composition Profiler, which layers stand out as taking a long time for After Effects to render?

How does After Effects behave in Safe Mode?

Plug-ins are just the likely cause of unexpected behaviors. They're certainly not the only ones. In After Effects 4.1 under Mac OS 7.6, there was a fax extension that caused all source footage to show as 0 x 0. Why? No clue. But when it was disabled, everything was back to working as expected.

Having to purge frequently is unusual. I hope you're able to figure that out soon.

Report · Nov 07, 2023

Hoi!

Just thought I'd way in on my experience with this issue, and what I have found. 2 Days in a row with ADOBE support and screen sharing, them uninstalling and reinnstalling, emptying caches and clicking about menus and preferences as I do myself regulary has proven worthless. They now ask me to reinstall Win11 (which I suspect is the culprit in combination with some weird AE bug), and I will comply just in hopes that this issue will reach DEV team like they told me. Repairing M Vis. c++ files en masse neither fixed anything. A 3 second 1080P video without any plugins will slowly fill my ram in AE, especially easy to reacrete crash/black screen and error "cannot allocate random small mem number". I just need to render it several times. BUT! I found a workaround that worked for me. Hold Shift+ go to general pref menu -> Secret menu tab. And I set this:

After that my rendering worked like a charm never going over 6GB of ram usage, mostly workload around 3GB.

So it seems AE is not purging memory/RAM like Premiere is. I have not read up on how these 2 uses RAM access, but something must be very off in the way AE/win11+AE handles RAM usage. Microsoft and Adobe seem to be the ones that must fix this. Purging memory manually and using secret menus should not be a customer workload.

Happy Trials!

Report · Nov 28, 2023

Just wanted to chime in and say that after months and months of suffering with this issue (regardless of safe mode, comp complexity, resolution, bit depth, etc) the latest update has finally resolved the problem for me (so far). I can finally use this (still buggy, horribly optimised) software without having to spam purge my ram every 5 minutes and face constant crashes. I can also render inside after effects again instead of resorting to media encoder - a relief because often media encoder would create flashing frames and other weird bugs with more complex comps.

Can't believe it took this long to fix this issue, but at least for now (AE 24.0.3) it is resolved, so for any newcomers to this thread please try updating. None of the other fixes mentioned in this thread did anything for me.

Cheers

Report · Nov 28, 2023

Just wanted to add that I'm using the exact same extensions, the exact same rig, the same OS. Nothing has changed except the AE version, so clearly the Adobe line that the problem is not with their software was pretty false

Report · Dec 04, 2023

How are you finding 24? Mine is God awfully slow.

Report · Dec 11, 2023

It's definitely slow, and the ram issue has intermittently returned (although not quite as frequently as before). End of my tether with this software, honestly.

Report · Feb 15, 2024

Hey all, due to the inaction from Adobe, there is a workaround we can do temporarily:

1. Go to EDIT > PREFERENCES > MEMORY & PERFORMANCE:

2. Increase the "RAM reserved for other applications" to a higher amount so that AE has only a limited amount of RAM to work with and cannot leak more than that. This will allow your OS to utilise the remaining reserved RAM and not be laggy. (Ive attached a screenshot).

Cheers

Report · May 12, 2024

Experiencing same issue now. The RAM is allowed up to 52 Gb, no matter if I have any additional pluging or expressions, it eats all the memory I allow it to take, and then sends me "Not enough memory" error. It's happening for over a few month, I thought it's some issue with my hardware, which is not, as I see now.

Instead of doing my job I'm tweaking with this kind of issues...

Report · Jul 06, 2024

Hello people I am here to announce that ae 2024 is using up 100GB of ram when idling and doing nothing I just opened the program clicked on the last project which has a single audio file init. I previewed the audio file once and sat at my desk while looking at task manager and in 3 minutes it shot upto 100gb of usage. For the smarty pants multi frame rendering is off and cache when idle is also off. I'm in a state of bliss right now and have broke my monitor in the process it now has a hole in it

Report · Jul 07, 2024

Ah mann.. not the monitor again.. oh well.

Report · Aug 10, 2024

Bumping in 2024 (Related Issue):

I found this thread, and it seems very similar to an issue I'm having with AE RAM settings .

My problem I'm having on the latest version is that AE won't cap how much memory it uses in the Memory & Performance settings (even when I set it). I don't want AE ever using more than 40GB of RAM of my total 64GB. I need 24GB for other things I'm also doing simultaneously.

But no matter how many times I set it, AE keeps resetting it to whatever it feels like. Already been in an Adobe chat all day, and best solutino was to reset preferences and delete the preferences folder (which didn't work).

Here is a video of my issue:

https://youtu.be/qb8UbZftbTg?si=OrgBreH8HmDbiB0d

Report · Aug 10, 2024

That is very strange. I'd start an entirely new discussion post about it.

Report · Aug 11, 2024

Yup, already did. Thanks! It's right here at this link, if you have any insights:

Memory Settings Randomly Changing - Adobe Community - 14731202

Report · Sep 28, 2024

Have been experiencing the same problem for sometime now... its really freaking frustrating... its gotten to a point now even when im importing a single video not even HD btw into the comp it isnt playing and asking to install more memory. This is real bad man.