Photoshop memory usage grows by 10MB per second

[Bekf]

Macbook Air M3, 8GB, 15inch 2024

Photoshop memory usage grows by 10MB per second with no files open.

Photoshop has become unuasble. Not great considering my job is at least 50% Photoshop use. This session I lost some work because I had to Force Quit PS yet again (numerous times a day) because I had waited 10 mins for a flat file to save. It has hung at 93%.

I've tried going back to 2024 and there is a small improvement. I'm back to 2025 because I uninstalled all PS versions and then installed 2025 again to see if it made a difference.

I've attached a video of Activity Monitor showing Photoshop's increasing memory usage. I have no files open in Photoshop while this video taken.

[Sameer K · Accepted solution]

Hey, @Bekf. Welcome to the Photoshop Community. I'll need more info to help you figure this out. Please share the system info from Photoshop Help > System info > Copy and paste into a text document > Upload and attach here. 

Please test and confirm if the issue exists with Photoshop (Beta). You can get Photoshop (beta) from the Creative Cloud > Apps tab > Beta Apps section. 

If this does not help, please ensure no stale preferences in your Photoshop. You can go to the location of the preference folder below and rename it to back it up. (https://adobe.ly/3u7u84j) This method is more effective than the in-app Reset Preferences at quit method. 

macOS: Hold down the Option key in the Finder when using the Go menu. The library will appear below the current user's home directory.

Library > Preferences > Adobe Photoshop [version] Settings

Rename the Adobe Photoshop folder by adding a .old at the end. (Adobe Photoshop 2025 > Rename > Adobe Photoshop 2025.old)

This will give a fresh start to Photoshop as a new installation.

Let me know if it helps. Thanks!
Sameer K

(Type '@' and type my name to mention me when you reply)

[Bekf]

Thank you @Sameer K

I've installed PS Beta and it seems stable. I'll work with it a bit to make sure, but looks good. If not, I'll try your other option above.

I've attached the System Info from PS 2025 help. Photoshop 2025 had been open with no files open overnight with my laptop asleep and was not responding when I tried to quit it with 20.98 GB memory usage. Screenshot attached too.

Thanks again for your fast response and your help

Bek

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Hi @Bekf curious how you figured you had 20.98 GB memory usage when your computer only has 8 GB total and only ~5 GB for Photoshop (well below minimums). Are you referring to the scratch disk usage?

[Trevor.Dennis]

That's not going to be a great Photoshop user experience with that spec.  It might be worth installing 22.2, which is the furthest back you can go.  No need to uninstall the curent versions — use whichever one is working best for you on the day.

[Bekf]

The same spec was fine with my M1 so I didn't anticipate needing to up the GB with the M3.
I'm just testing out PS Beta and it's flying right now.  I'm not sure on installing software from before M3 was released. Have you tested this @Trevor.Dennis ?

[Bekf]

Not so curious @Kevin Stohlmeyer... I'm just reporting what Activity Monitor is displaying in the Memory tab

[D Fosse]

@Bekf 

That includes both physical memory (RAM) and virtual memory (Photoshop's scratch disk).

How much free disk space do you have?

The scratch disk has no limits other than your available disk space. That's why Photoshop can handle huge file sizes without crashing or bringing down the whole system. It is perfectly normal for the scratch file to grow to hundreds of GB. All you need to do is make sure you have enough disk space.

That said, having only a few GB RAM available for the Photoshop application and sub-modules, will not work well. Normally, Photoshop will use somewhere between 2 and 5 GB running idle, before actually doing anything, and this will be loaded into physical RAM. 16 GB RAM should be considered absolute minimum these days, 32 more comfortable.

[Bekf]

Hi @D Fosse 

I have at least one dedicated SSD scratch disk with minimum 600 GB of space at any one time. Depending on what I"m doing I'll have two or three dedicated scratch disks. It made very little difference how much scratch disk space I had (unless I didn't have any) with Photoshop 2025. Not having this problem with the Beta version at this point.

[Trevor.Dennis]

If this is an M3 Mac, then I'm guessing it has 'Unified' memory, so that 8GB is shared with system and screen?  Is that the case?

[D Fosse]

Yes, that too. "Unified" memory just means shared system memory. The GPU will use a big chunk of it.

For Apple silicon, or any machine with shared memory, the basic rule of thumb is to double the amount of RAM you would normally need. So let me correct my numbers above to 32 GB bare minimum, and 64 GB for reasonably efficient operation.

[Whimsical_impression9347]

Same here, Photoshop was opened and left for a while without openig any project in it.  After a while Photoshop took most of my RAM and kept getting more and more every few seconds.  At this stage closing it causes total freeze for while. 

[D Fosse]

We've had a lot of people reporting back that a complete and full reset of preferences has fixed this problem. Remove the whole Settings folder from your user account, which will revert Photoshop to clean factory state (save out actions and brushes).

The preferences/settings file contains the whole application configuration, including lots of hidden parameters. It is rewritten on every application shutdown, making it prone to corruption.

Do not migrate preferences. Small errors accumulate, and new application code may exaggerate and bring out latent problems.

[Whimsical_impression9347]

Thanks for taht, it certainly slowed the process down but if I give Photoshop enough time (for example leave it open over night - laptop lid closed) it will take all available RAM into posession.  

[ExUSA]

You need to trade that computer for one with more memory. I use two machines in production, an i7 with 16GB and an M1 with 16GB and I know how to manage RAM usage but even so, I have to quit out and relaunch Photoshop every couple of days. My M1 is usually in the yellow for memory pressure (which is ok but pushing things a bit) and the i7 stays in the green.

You can get a new M4 mini with 16GB of RAM for US$500 which is a fantastic deal, or an M4 MacBook Air for about US$1000.

I'm planning to get an M4 mini this summer and probably going with 32GB of RAM.

[D Fosse]

This is not normal, and there's no reason to accept it. You shouldn't need to relaunch Photoshop. It should not use more memory than you allocate in Preferences, plus scratch disk.

All the signs I've seen so far, reading the threads about it and trying to replicate (which I can't!) - points to the system pagefile. That's where this builds up, and what claims all this memory is the GPU. Of course, Photoshop <> GPU is a very tightly interwoven interaction, so a problem in one can be hard to separate from a problem in the other.

But again, clearing prefs has fixed it for many users. Others report that a new version didn't have the problem - which amounts to the same thing: fresh prefs.

[Whimsical_impression9347]

Having more RAM definitely helps but don’t expect miracles until Adobe fixes this issue. My laptop has 64GB and I need to switch off photoshop few times a day. I tried the suggestion to put a hard limit on the memory used by photoshop in its the preferences but that creates another problem.  Very quickly photoshop becomes sluggish, then unresponsive and then it crashes.

[michaelv76180831]

I have 256 GB of RAM in my system and just discovered that Photoshop, with nothing open, was using over 46 GB of RAM. I had it open for a bit over 24 hours and was using it in conjunction with Lightroom, but even Lightroom which I was using with a few thousand photos, was only taking 20 GB of RAM. 

This Photoshop RAM leak is a serious issue. Not only that, it was using 3-5% of my total system resources in the background doing nothing. Not an insignificant amount given that I'm running a 32 core/64 thread system. 

I hope Adobe addresses this issue. It's something that seems to happen every few years. 

[davescm]

@michaelv76180831 That sounds normal. Photoshop will use system RAM up to the limit specified and, by design, does not hand it back once it has taken it. If it did, batch processing would be extremely slow as RAM would be continuously handed back to the OS then re-requested.

Dave 

[D Fosse]

@michaelv76180831 That's right. This is normal and by design, not a memory leak.

A memory leak would be if Photoshop went beyond the limit you set in Preferences, then went on to using up all 256 GB, leaving nothing for other processes. At this point, your whole system would choke.

Raster image editing moves huge amounts of data around. People usually blame this on Photoshop, but in reality it's just a big load of data that needs to go somewhere. Even 256 GB RAM won't be enough for big/multiple files - it needs to go to disk, aka the scratch disk.

If you want to reduce Photoshop's footprint on the system, reduce history states to 1 or 2. This will dramatically reduce the scratch file size.

The CPU doesn't have much impact, that's normally not where the bottleneck is (with one notable exception - file compression). 

The parametric editing in Lightroom is much less I/O-intensive, and normally needs a lot less memory (real or virtual). On the other hand, CPU/GPU speed is more critical.