Photoshop 2024 memory is out of control

[hqhempen]

I'm not sure what's going on but basic editing randomly bugs out as if Photoshop is running something BIG in the background. I'm not using content aware or AI generative fill, this is happening just when making simple curve adjustments and brushing. It is at times using 99% of my 64GB RAM despite the performance settings being set at 16GB or lower, which finally crashes after freezing everything in Windows 10 entirely for about 5 solid minutes. 

After reopening and messing with settings for a while, completely disabling photoshop from using any GPUs help improve performance dramatically. So I guess in the interim that's what I'd recommend for anyone having unexplained runaway memory leak issues. Maybe it's an Nvidia problem who knows that's been pretty bad lately from them as well.

[D Fosse]

Can you open task manager and post screenshots of the memory usage graphs - both system memory and GPU memory? Not the numbers, the graphs.

Also Photoshop Help > System Info.

On the face of it, this does sound like the GPU eating system memory. GPU memory usage tends to increase slowly over time until max, so it looks like a leak.

The thing is, Photoshop doesn't need to use all the RAM. It will use the scratch disk and write all temporary data to disk anyway. RAM usage in Photoshop is mainly a fast access cache, and with a fast scratch disk (NVMe) operation won't slow down much even when the RAM allocation is used up.

Normally, setting the preferences to 70 % memory allocation is about optimal. I can't see why limiting to 25 % or so, which you say you have, will do any good. Set it back to 70.