NEW MacBook Air M1 8gb 256gb: "your system has run out of application memory"

I had a mid 2014 MacBook Pro with soldered in 8 gb Ram, 512 gb HD storage. I was getting this same "your system is running out of application memory". I purchased the MacBook Air with 16 gb & 1 TB . I used my Time Machine back up of the 2014 MacBook Pro to migrate all my files and applications over to the new one. I then downloaded Big Sur.

I had seen so many videos on YouTube showing people running many programs and tabs in Safari. Almost immediately I got the error as above to my shock. I called Apple a few times but the best advise was from the first representative I spoke too. Re-install Big Sur without deleting everything.

It worked great and I have not had the problem again. I watch my Memory pressure on the Activity Monitor right now I am running PS, LR, Safari with ten tabs and Firefox with six tabs, Ibooks , iTunes , Messages, Calendar , Apple Mail and others and the memory pressure is low. Right now the Memory is 11.81 gb (out of 16 gb) and this machine is lightening fast. I use Topaz filters and they operate swiftly. I re-boot every few days and the initial memory is reduced to 6 gb. I am very happy with this machine. It still has a few bugs, my SpyderPro5 keeps saying it is not running but is. To get my Topaz and Nik plugins to work in PS I have to go through Bridge. Topaz customer service says they are working on fix and will have it shortly. Adobe also says they are working on fixes. Hope that helps.

sh9001 wrote:

It’s working for me, that’s the only extension I had and I just completely deleted it. The Safari never crashed again so far, I checked activity monitor, Safari now is only using less than 1G memory instead of 6.8G before.

I think this extension is not compatible with Big Sur, no problem at all before I upgrade the system.

I recall one time in the past I had some Safari extension

installed and when there was an OS upgrade, it went ballistic.

Uninstalling returned all to normal. So, it is possible Safari

extensions can kill system performance.

I think I was having this exact same issue. It looked like even relatively simple processes were causing me to get "out of memory" issues and app crashes. I was trying to export a Photos slideshow as a video and it would cause the memory usage to skyrocket - starting at 2GB usage and ramping up quickly to 40GB usage indicated on the activity monitor. This is interesting since I only have 8GB or ram. The memory pressure graph looked like Ayers Rock (or Uluru if you prefer)... a huge plateau extending WAY into the red until the app finally crashes every time.

Anyway... I just updated to the new Big Sur 11.2 update and I was able to execute this Photos export for the very first time with no issue. The memory pressure graph held steady around 4GBs the whole time. I think this update may have fixed the memory issue. At least I'm hoping it did!

FWIW, try a different browser beside Safari (Microsoft Edge or Firefox)

and see if the same thing happens. I have the 8 GB M1 Air and I am

seeing Safari gobbling up a lot of RAM, a lot more than I have seen on

my iMac, and I don't open tons of tabs. Perhaps Safari is the culprit and

not ready for prime time on the M1 systems or on any 8GB Big Sur system..

For what it’s worth, maorfrommiami and @All, but even Intel based Macs running Big Sur are seeing something similar, though their systems react to the issue differently: instead of complaining about running out of “application memory”, their systems simply close the Safari tab that is taking a lot of memory!

My advice:

Find what tab/website is taking up so much memory, and run that tab/website within its own Safari window—without any other tabs—or within a different browser.

This workaround helped the Intel based Big Sur Safari users.

The root of the problem is that some websites are improperly coded, so they use browser memory space, when they should be using server-side memory.

Some browsers will keep using more local memory, until they “break” (as Safari on M1 seems to be doing), or they “hold fast” and disallow the website to keep using browser memory (as Safari on Intel seems to be doing). Neither is an entire solution.

The websites need to respect their users, and not abuse their users’ computer resources.

(I had a JavaScript program which wasn’t running from a server, so I had no choice. So I saw what can happen with using local browser resources.)

FWIW, opening many tabs can have an impact on memory regardless

of how much RAM you have depending on the sites themselves.

Simple example, I was browsing the tech site C-NET the other day.

Scrolling down the news page to the point where posts were a

day old, I checked Activity Monitor->Memory and saw that this site

alone dumped 1.5 GB to my new MacBook Air.

Even this community, having the MacBook Air page open and this page

I am responding on is hogging nearly 400 MB!

Websites these days are worse memory hogs than some graphics apps.

So, if you are going to work on any system today with tons of tabs and

sites opened, get as much RAM as you can afford because websites

are only going to get worse!

Updates are certainly coming, ewl930, as they always do.

However, there’s only so much that can be done on your computer to deal with abuse of your computer resources by websites!

Placing those abusive websites within their own browser window helps, because it segregates the resources being used, thereby.

However, so long as they abuse your computer resources, something is bound to “break”, at one point or another.

So, in any case, y’all need to determine what websites/webpages are abusing your computer resources and decide whether that is acceptable behavior, to you.

Also, be aware of what browser extensions and “plugins” y’all are using! These are third party software that can lead to various misbehaviors, especially on a brand-new Operating System (OS).

Are they fully compatible?

Thanks for this and all the comments about problematic extensions! I just deleted the Rakuten extension as well and am seeing a huge improvement already. Bitwarden (password keeper) is the only one I have running now and I’ll delete that next if need be.

It's the extensions. I had the same issue for Safari and deleted "Rakuten", all good now.

If there is one available that works on an M1 Mac, perhaps an

Ad blocker may be the ticket on many sites. It seems that many

Ads have needless animation and special effects (read memory hog)

to try and coerce you into visiting their sites.

Even before I got my new MBA, I had seen Safari spewing warnings

about excessive memory or CPU use all of which appeared to be

ad related.

I have the 16GB M1 mac mini and I get the same thing. The RAM is absolutely not the issue. You shouldn't hit that error until all of your swap memory is also used, i.e., not only are you filling up your RAM, but also the remainder of the storage on your disk (in my case 420GB of extra space). I'm guessing the real issue is a memory leak somewhere. The fact that they would suggest you upgrade the RAM for this issue is pretty insane though, and seems very dishonest. Hopefully their product team is aware of this issue.

MJBookless wrote:

I am new to Mac's, but was concerned when I got this message (see picture) on my IMAC M1 with 8‑core CPU, 8‑core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine, 8GB unified memory, and 1 TB SD.

I was looking at other peoples comments and it sounded like GB of space were being used, where for me, I had barely anything open with just under .2GB being used and I was running out of application memory. Any thoughts are helpful, as I said I am new to Apple, and have very little computer knowledge. Thanks …

Using Activity Monitor, on the Memory tab, with the View set to “All Processes” (rather than the default of “My Processes”) will show you the memory usage of the processes running on your machine.

You can even reorder the processes by whatever criterion you choose.

Since all (truly) modern Operating Systems (OSs) use Virtual Memory, the amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) you have, on your system, has little bearing, except for the performance decrease that swapping memory between RAM and your Virtual Memory (VM) drive will incur.

Generally speaking, one will not be, actually, running out of “application memory”, unless, and until, your Solid-State Drive (SSD), upon which your VM drive resides, runs out of space.

Unfortunately, I have seen cases where Big Sur seems to get “confused”, and “thinks” it is on the verge of running out of space, even when such doesn’t appear to be the case.

If you can reproduce such situations, it would be helpful to report such to Apple, as a Bug Report.

…

I have tried uploading my picture here, but it won't do it.

In order to upload a picture, you need to click on the “picture” icon/button just to the left of the “YouTube”-like button, at the bottom of your Post window, when composing a post.

The problem is surely in Safari. See the website "macrumors" (I was reading about this issue). After less than 10 minutes it was already using 35GB of RAM. THE WORST THING IS THAT I CLOSED THE TAB AND SAFARI CONTINUED TO EAT MEMORY FOR A NON-EXISTING TAB (see the 2nd picture, it increased to 48GB even after I closed the Tab).