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Sounds like a similar situation to what I experience. I do not know if it is due to my older chipset and not updating the BIOS so that Lightroom is allocated more and more memory without releasing it, or if this is just an unsolved bug in Lightroom affecting select user hardware configurations. But it must require a huge amount of memory to store information about masks on a pixel rather than parametric basis (e.g. brushes, subjects, background, people). My Lightroom can suddenly surge to 18 GB RAM usage and the only reason it cannot go higher is that there simply is no more to grab. My new PC will have 64 GB RAM and also a newer BIOS and chipset so I hope that solves the problem.
By the way, just noticed right now. On my PC, Photoshop is not acting so angelic either with memory. I had Photoshop opened to work on an image, which had a total size of under 1 GB. I left Photoshop open, but closed all images, and the memory allocated by Photoshop did not decrease at all by this. It is still taking over 6 GB of memory even though no image is opened. I do not know if my situation is getting worse, but with my workflow of Lightroom to Photoshop to Topaz or NIK products, back to Photoshop and back to Lightroom, I now find I have to constantly shut down Lightroom and Photoshop whenever I am just finished with them. That means that when I do an "Edit in Photoshop" from Lightroom, I then have to close down Lightroom or I cannot get the Topaz softwares to work without error from Photoshop.
In fact, the situation is more bizarre if I open up the 8 processes associated with Photoshop, see the image below. The 6.4 GB being used by Photoshop seem to be of my last edited image (which like I said only had a size of under 1 GB) even though I have closed this image down. This is really totally messed up with regards to memory allocations.
I can't help but think there are some misunderstandings here. High memory usage in itself is normal and desirable. Free memory is wasted memory. This is caching; it's how memory should be used.
It gets reallocated constantly. Note the dip here; this is after going crazy with AI masks - and then just switching to a different frame in Develop.
A memory leak is when memory usage grows without any activity, until it hits the ceiling and runs out. I've never seen that. It maxes at around 80-85% and never goes above that.
There are no performance differences with high or low memory usage.
I do suspect, however, that this can be an issue with integrated GPUs, because the GPU and system compete for the same memory. In that case timing matters, if, say, an application requests memory already occupied by the GPU or vice versa. That's not a consideration with dedicated GPUs.
ust another observation. I edited a photo in Lightroom just now, with a number of people based masks. I had to restart Lightroom underway due to freeze of my PC. I then did an "Edit in Photoshop" to do more work. Before I shut down Lightroom, I had a look at the GPU memory usage in Task Manager on the Performance tab. I was still in the Lightroom Develop module pointing at my image, but not doing anything there. I saw that almost all of my GPU RAM was taken up in the "Dedicated GPU Memory Usage", and this I imagine is what gives me problems when trying to use Topaz Sharpen or Topaz Studio 2 from Photoshop. I shut down Lightroom, and saw that my GPU memory usage dropped pretty much to 0. I then opened Lightroom again, which opened with the same image loaded in the Development module, and my "Dedicated GPU Memory Usage" crept up slowly again but plateaued at a lesser amount, see attached image. I am curious why Task Manager is reporting 7.4/12.0 GB is used but the Utilization is only at 7%. Perhaps "Utilization" refers to the GPU activity and not memory? Anyway, what is upsetting here is the hold that Lightroom seems to have on the "Dedicated GPU Memory" even when I am not doing something that should be done in the GPU, meaning using Lightroom Denoise. This is why, I believe, I need to shut down Lightroom before I can use Topaz apps. Again, perhaps this memory allocation is specific to my mix of older motherboard/chipset and newer softwares and graphic card.
And yet another interesting observation. Based on the above, seeing that Lightroom is using up a lot of my GPU RAM and keeping a hold on it, I changed my Edit->Preferences Performance tab to not use the GPU. After restart of Lightroom I can see that my GPU memory utilization remains low. I also notice Lightroom taking a bit more time in getting my previews up on the screen. But then I did a denoise on an image just now, with Task Manager open on the Performance -> GPU monitor, and it did not look like Lightroom was really using GPU memory. However, the denoise task was done quickly, just as if I had set the Edit->Preferences Performance on "Auto". It seems that Lightroom will always use the GPU for doing the denoise work, no matter what the performance setting is set to. I am now wondering if I now no longer will need to shut Lightroom down when I want to use a Topaz app, since now Lightroom is not hogging the GPU RAM.
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