Your System Has Run Out Of Application Memory

Also on my modern computer from a year ago from 2023 in the newest Lightroom 14.0.1 the RAM climbs up all the time, when Lightroom is on, even without photo editing, until the computer crashes.

Just chiming in. I had the same problem and it drove me insane for many hours, I was about to throw the computer against the wall. In the end, after deleteing some unimportant documents, freeing up some space, and restarting - I can't tell this was part of the issue, but in addition I updated my OS to latest version, deleted all the Adobe CC programs from my computer and installed Photoshop again. Hope this helps others. 

I had the same issue and tried everything. I Finally solved the problem by using adobe cc cleaner and here is the installation link:

https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

Wanted to add my experience to this thread in the hopes that it would help Adobe sort out what's going on. I will also try checking the permissions.

I am running a MacBook Pro (2022) with M1 Max and 64GB. Ventura 13.2.1 and Adobe apps all updated.

I recently added about 1,200+ images to the catalog. Ever since then it has been hanging on the beachball. I force quit, try to do something, and it comes back again. Restart. Clear preferences. Even ran Onyx to run utilities. Nothing made a difference. Until I stopped syncing. Then it was fine, and I was able to make changes again.

Today I downloaded a dozen photos to the catalog and, with the sync on, it did it again only this time I got the error message so I actually found out what was happenening. With the same configuration as the OP, LrC ballooned to more than 112GB of memory usage. It was the only app running and I recently restarted.

-- Also I really didn't do any real editing on the photo, just a couple of "healing" moves to remove some glare.

The heal tool doesn't use the GPU for acceleration, but uses/abuses memory under the guise of GPU caching, which effectively deprives the appliction of memory on occasions. I suspect that's what you're seeing, and like Conrad I've seen it a few times on my Studio M1 Ultra with 64GB of memory. Thankfully, at least in my case, it's not been to the detriment of peformance.

Hi, are you saying that is the issue?  It's at 12 because of compatibility issues w/ various plugins i use in Ableton & Protools, and because the versions of those programs are more stable running on 12.  I will see if  others are able to update without issues.

By not wanting/trusting to update the MACOS, do you mean an update from v12.0 to v12.6.4? Or an upgrade to Ventura?

Apple puts those updates out their for bug fixes as well as security improvements and performance improvements. Unfortunately not all fixes are clearly identified in the release notes. 

On the other hand, if you are meaning you do not trust going to Ventura, then I agree, that one has had massive issues just with LrC. Mind you, I cannot, so no first hand experiance with that one.

Adding to the theory that this is a MACOS issue, apparently Monterey is not well thought of in terms of bugs. Some things to look at:

https://osxdaily.com/2021/12/03/your-system-has-run-out-of-application-memory-mac-error/

(note the mention in that one about the OS being buggy and a hope for improvements in future releases, i.e. why are you still at 12.0)

https://beebom.com/fix-your-system-has-run-out-of-application-memory-error-mac/

(note the last point in that one)

https://setapp.com/how-to/fix-system-has-run-out-of-application-memory

https://www.macube.com/how-to/system-runs-out-of-application-memory-fix.html

Do you leave your MAC running/on at all times?

If so, try shutting it down, then turning back on, might clear up app mem in use (not released)

And if that does not help, try a safe boot.

And yes that MACOS and M1/M2, but more so M1 has had a memory leak issue.

I’ve seen that error on my Mac too, but not very often. Like I will run the same thing after restarting and not see the error again. And usually I can’t spot anything that should be causing it; for the things I do, memory is usually not a problem on my 32GB M1 Pro. So I believe the Out of Application Memory error is not a result of normal memory demands, but some kind of memory reporting bug in macOS. One reason I think that is that Apple Silicon Macs are generally supposed to manage memory better than Intel Macs. There have been so many demonstrations online of how an Apple Silicon Mac with 8GB unified memory is able to smoothly handle workloads that choke an Intel Mac with 8GB RAM.

Another reason is that the current memory management system is generally a lot better than it used to be. We used to only have live memory and virtual memory, but now macOS can manage more situations by also using compressed memory.

Although many people respond to this problem with the usual memory troubleshooting techniques, I don’t think they are going to help, because in so many cases, what is running is just not demanding enough to push this modern memory management over the cliff on a Mac with 64GB unified memory (which is way more than most people need). An error like “Your System Has Run Out Of Application Memory” suggests that macOS is not able to meet memory demands using live memory, compressed memory, or virtual memory, but that should only happen under exceedingly large workloads that almost no one does.

When I have encountered this problem, it was random and so not easy to reproduce and demonstrate. But if someone finds that the combination of things that causes the error on their Mac is repeatable, that should be sent to Apple as a bug report with the repeatable steps so they can figure out where to start to solve it.