Hey Adobe Team,
I’ve noticed that Photoshop is consuming an excessive 75.2GB of memory while working on just a few artworks. Given my system’s specs, I wouldn’t expect such extreme usage, and I’d like to understand what’s causing this.
System Specs:
MacBook Pro M4 Max (64GB RAM, 2TB SSD)
macOS Sequoia
Photoshop 26.3
Memory Usage Setting: 43,020MB
Observed Issues:
Opening a few high-resolution files quickly pushes RAM usage beyond 75GB.
Scratch disks get used heavily despite ample available space.
Performance slows down significantly, and Photoshop occasionally crashes.
Troubleshooting Steps Taken:
- Adjusted memory allocation in settings
- Cleared caches & temp files
- Modified scratch disk priorities
- Enabled/disabling GPU acceleration
- Reinstalled Photoshop
- Checked for background processes
Looking for Answers:
Is this a known issue, or is there a fix/workaround? I’d appreciate any insights on optimizing Photoshop’s memory usage because this is seriously affecting my workflow. Thanks in advance for any guidance!
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Replies
I am puzzled as to how your Mac reports 75GB of RAM usage on a system that you say has only 64GB of RAM.
By davescm
We've seen some cases of that, both on Mac and Windows, and this has puzzled me too. So I took a closer look at how Windows Task Manager reports memory usage. It turns out, somewhat to my surprise, that the scratch disk does not turn up here.
What it has to be, in addition to physical RAM, is the system pagefile. That's the only possible explanation.
That also explains why people report their whole system slowing down. A saturated pagefile will do that.
In any case, we've had several indications that the root of the problem is a corrupt install, or, more likely, corrupt preferences. In many cases, people have fixed it with a completely fresh install with completely fresh preferences.
Two important things about evaluating memory usage on an Apple Silicon Mac…
The first point is that the Memory column does not represent installed RAM (unified memory). It represents the total memory management system. It’s easier to evaluate what’s really happening with memory if you un-hide some of the columns that are hidden by default, such as Real Mem and VM Compressed. For example, in the picture below, you see that for Photoshop, the Memory column reports 2.31GB (the total), but Real Mem reports only 239.1MB (actual memory used on the RAM chips). The rest of the 2.31GB is compressed or swapped. Why just 239.1MB of real RAM? It’s because I haven’t opened any documents yet. Similarly, the Memory column reports 10.80GB for Adobe After Effects, but when you look at the Real Mem column you see it’s really only using 732.2MB of real RAM at the moment and a lot of the rest is compressed. macOS and apps constantly shuffle data in and out of these states to use real RAM on whatever data needs to be handled the fastest at any moment.
By the way, this is why it’s easily possible to see a Memory value that exceeds the total RAM in the Mac — it’s also counting how that memory is being shuffled outside straight RAM, such as compressed and swapped memory. On any Mac, if you total the values in the Memory column for the hundreds of processes running at any time, under heavy workloads that total can exceed the amount of installed RAM, for the same reason: It’s counting data stashed in multiple forms of memory in addition to the RAM chips. (If you wanted to try this exercise, just select all the rows in Activity Monitor and copy them to your favorite spreadsheet.)
Side note — I don’t think any of these columns accounts for the memory usage of the Photoshop scratch file, which is sort of a Photoshop private virtual memory system.
The second point is, to fully understand memory usage, when showing a screen shot of the Memory tab in Activity Monitor, always show the bottom, where the Memory Pressure graph is. This is critical. As explained above, the numbers you see in the Memory column are not actually just about the RAM chips, they are all relative to the total memory management system, all of the different ways macOS can cope with large memory requests. The Memory Pressure graph is important because it shows you the “big picture” of how well the complete macOS memory management system (real memory, compressed memory, swap memory, purgeable memory) is coping with demand. When the graph is green, then it doesn’t matter if some of the numbers look scary, macOS is actually handling all memory requests with no problem. If it stays orange or red most of the time, again it doesn’t matter what the numbers say, the memory system is overloaded and the next Mac should be ordered with more Unified Memory. (Mine is usually green, it’s only yellow here because I have a bunch of major apps open at the same time.)
Neither of those points answers why Theii is seeing 75GB usage for Photoshop. That does seem unusually high, unless the documents are large or have many layers. However, in the forums here we have seen various threads posted about macOS reporting the memory usage of Adobe apps to be far beyond the RAM installed in that computer. It has often been reported for Lightroom Classic; although I have not run into that, I have had it happen in Premiere Pro where there was one project file when Premiere Pro memory usage would climb until it wanted over 150GB of RAM (on my 32GB computer), and then froze up the Mac when its memory management system decided it was out of options (real RAM, compressed RAM, purgeable, and swap are all maxed out). I don’t know what causes that, but many posts here show that it does happen, whether it’s a memory leak/bug on the Apple side or the Adobe side… But when users post about excessively large memory usage here, we rarely get a good answer. Hope we get a better answer this time.
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