Massive memory leak in v26.2

[coffeecore]

Hey all, 

I recently upgrade from PS2020 to PS25 and aside from ui changes, I've had a shockingly bad memory leak issue crop up. Had a small psd open, 1000x1000, had 6 layers, and have ai features turned off. When i left my computer for the evening, i was using around 10gb of RAM of my total 64GB. When i woke up, i noticed my computer really chugging, which concerned me because it is a beast. Task manager showed i was using an 100% memory. I immediately closed chrome, nothing was released to free up ram, didn't see photoshop explicitly showing high memory usage, so didn't think about it at first. I started closing things down one by one based on the RAM usage in task manager, and nothing worked until i closed photoshop. That immediately released it.

Won't be leaving docs open over night any time soon, but would be nice to have this fixed as i don't like resetting up my work space every day. Also generally just want to go back to PS2020 haha. 

Anyways, system specs in case it helps:

Photoshop ver 26.2 (2025)

Windows OS11 home 64bit (10.0.26100)

I9-14900kf

ASUS ROG STRIX Z790-E

Nvidia 4090 Liquid Suprim, 24GB

64 GB DDR5 RAM

Thanks! 

[CMass]

Hi @coffeecore, 

Thank you for reaching out and sharing the details about your computer and the memory leak issue you're experiencing. Please take a look at this post and see if the suggested solution helps resolve the issue on your end. https://adobe.ly/42nmX77

^CM

[J-T-C]

Also getting memory leak on PS 26.3 (MacOS 15.3).

Memory usage keeps increasing over time even with documents closed but photoshop open. Usage builds up until it uses all system memory and requires a force quit. Even with memory usage capped in PS prefernces. 

[D Fosse]

@coffeecore 

OK, there's a few things to clear up here, that hopefully can narrow this down.

First of all, Photoshop does not release memory when a file is closed. It is reused and recycled as long as Photoshop remains open. This is by design, and there are good reasons for it. This is not a bug.

I then tried to reproduce this by stress-testing my system.  I opened a couple of 20K+ files and piled up layers and history states, until I got a scratch file of about 250 GB. Two interesting things came out of that:

One, the memory readout in Task Manager never, at any point, exceeded 88%. That was the plateau, and this is with only 32 GB installed. The scratch file, meanwhile, kept growing.

Two, judging by what other people report here in these cases - memory usage way above installed RAM - I would have expected the scratch file, as virtual memory, to be included in the Task Manager memory readout. But it wasn't! The scratch file doesn't show up anywhere here.

So that leads to the inevitable conclusion that what you're dealing with here is the Windows pagefile. The Windows pagefile should normally not come into play here at all, as long as you have enough scratch disk space. So something else is happening.

The most likely candidate is the GPU, performing tasks called by Photoshop. This would not go to scratch disk, but to dedicated VRAM first, then to shared system RAM, and then to Windows paging. Again, this is normally not a problem, but the usual complicating factor here is dual GPUs. This is where you could get conflicts and possibly memory leaks.

So long story short - if you have an integrated GPU somewhere in the mix here, disable it and try again. See section 6 & 7:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html