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

I have 16 gb memory & 1 TB. I get this error as well. I don't have that many applications running too.

I traded up from my MacBook Pro mid 2014 with soldered in 8 gb memory 512 mb because of this constant error.

Re-installed Big Sur after talking to Apple , didn't help when I called again yesterday they said applications these days take up a lot of memory!

Kind of annoying when all the videos on You tube were doing lots of speed tests and saying this is great!

What is the better browser Chrome or Firefox please?

Hoping new applications are more compatible but spend big money here and very disappointed.

Jeffrey Hughes3 wrote:

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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!

By the way, «The memory pressure graph» is not in units of GBs.

The graph, itself, is in units of %.

Additionally, the color of the graph is not directly related to the level of the graph. (It exhibits some hysteresis: going Yellow or Red at lower graph levels when the graph has a positive slope [increasing, rising], and back down to Green or Yellow at higher graph levels when the graph has a negative slope [decreasing, falling]. The color probably takes the rate of “swapping” [page-faults] into account. [I do wish that Activity Monitor would include such rate information.])

Jeffrey Hughes3:

I, too, have noticed an improvement in Virtual Memory (VM) handling.

I had a process that would, under 11.1, reliably cause swapfiles to proliferate (causing the «"your system has run out of application memory"» error, if one was too close to filling the drive).

With 11.2, that proliferation of swapfiles doesn’t happen, at least, not for that process.

In my opinion, the cause of all these problems lies in system recovery/time machine that fills first disko volume. I found that this volume sometimes is down (unmount) so recovery fills RAM. I am not sure for this, but when I mount this disk, and periodically make time machine update to external SSD, all problems vanish.

AusMacU wrote:

Halliday,

Why I say that it is because it is because Big Sur is running out of memory is because I have been monitoring the use of memory via Activity Monitor. What I have discovered that the Apple News app keeps taking up more and more memory over time. I don't think that that in itself should cause Big Sur to freeze because it should draw on virtual memory. However, the amount of virtual memory that is used seems to very very small. If I keep on closing down Apple News and re-opening it, then this doesn't happen. I haven't observed any other applications doing this but then I don't use a lot of different applications. …

When you say «the Apple News app keeps taking up more and more memory over time», are you referring to the use of your system RAM, or the amount of “Memory” that Activity Monitor claims «the Apple News app» is using?

What does Activity Monitor report if you bring up the App Information window, for «the Apple News app», and look at how much Memory is reported for each of its memory categories, such as Virtual Memory.

Along with this, how much Swap memory does Activity Monitor report as being used, for everything being run on your system?

What does the Memory Pressure graph show?

What color is the Memory Pressure graph?

How close to the top (100%) is the Memory Pressure graph?

(These two indicators do not track one-to-one.)

When I say that the system "locks up", this isn' entirely true. What seems to happen is that it becomes extremely slow. By this I mean that it may take 5-10 minutes to do anything. When people talk about the use of virtual memory slowing down the OS I don't think that they mean to this extent. I interpret this observation to mean that the amount of used memory of any type that is available to the OS has become extremely limited but that what little remains is used to do what can be done in whatever time it takes. …

What sort of drive are you running your macOS from? A Hard Disk Drive (HDD, spinning disk)? Fusion drive (a little better, but, often, not by much)? A Solid-State Drive (SSD)?

Swapping will, typically, slow a HDD or a Fusion drive, quite a bit.

An SSD will show much less slowing.

This behaviour only started when I upgraded from Catalina to Big Sur some time ago. I never had the issue under Catalina. My pattern of use hasn't changed to any significant extent. …

I actually had slower performance, and far more issues with running out of memory (and High Memory Pressure, often running in the Red), running under Catalina, up until the last Catalina update just before Big Sur came out.

I have had no issues under Big Sur more than what I had under Catalina just before the upgrade to Big Sur.

(Note, however, that I made certain not to upgrade to Big Sur with any incompatible software.)

If I can throw the question back to you, why do you claim, without any evidence, that the problem I'm reporting is "not "through running out of memory?"" I know that other things can often cause such problems but the fact that they CAN cause such problems doesn't mean that they ARE the cause of the problems. You are making that claim without a shred of evidence.

Not only have I had no such troubles with Big Sur, on my 8 GB RAM Intel Mac mini (minimal configuration); I have helped many others clean up their incompatible software (inherited from Catalina), to find that their systems run at least as well under Big Sur as they used to under Catalina.

(Admittedly, not everyone with such issues have been willing to work through cleaning up their systems.)

Activity monitor, over time, is staying in a range between 3gb and 6.something gb of App memory used. I've never seen it hit 7 yet, and I have 26 apps showing in my dock, with 17 safari tabs distributed among about 8 safari windows. no errors, everything is running just as fast as when I only had 4 apps open. I can live with bright white web pages at night.

SamhnaDubhadh wrote:

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When I worked with Apple Support, they simply opened up Activity Monitor to show that the memory was in high use (13gb/16gb). Then they encouraged me to reinstall macOS.

When you say «that the memory was in high use (13gb/16gb)», what are you referring to: the amount of total used Random Access Memory (RAM), in the listing of RAM usage, to the right of the Memory Pressure graph?

If so, that is of no concern, whatsoever!

In fact, if the total RAM usage is not 100%, then you are underutilizing the RAM on your computer: you bought much more RAM than you needed!

(Admittedly, 13GB is more than the RAM available on the next lower memory model, so not a truly big deal, in this case.)

Being concerned about this is an all too common misconception concerning modern computers!

…

No idea whether Apple actually reads any of these, …

Sorry, but no. Apple doesn’t tend to glean feedback from these fora.

If you wish to provide Apple Feedback, you can use Apple’s preferred Feedback mechanisms, such as Product Feedback - Apple.

Working directly with Apple Support would seem to be a good mechanism, as well, but …

DonHartUK wrote:

Just to add I have a M1 MacMini and experience same problem but for me Lightroom Classic is the memory hog " 8gb

That doesn’t sound like it should be a problem.

I have created Numbers documents that caused my Virtual Memory (VM) usage to exceed 32GB, on my M1 Mac mini (with 16GB unified memory).

Is your M1 Mac mini a 16GB or 8GB version?

Having all your unified Memory (RAM) used up is, absolutely, no problem at all!

In fact, if such is not being fully used up, you are not, fully, using your computer’s resources!

I have the 16gb ram in mine, and I'm still getting this error. And it's mostly Safari at fault, with nothing excessive about the few tabs open.

My MacMini is 16gb. Pop up has just come up again.

Q if its not a problem why the pop up?

This happened to me for the first time today on my 8gb M1 MBA and I was so shocked I neglected to take a screen shot. It showed Safari using a gigantic amount of memory with about 15 tabs open and a few other programs; like you, nothing that my older MBA couldn't handle easily. Apple's response is quite disappointing indeed. If/when it happens again to me, I'll be contacting them to complain as well. Keep us posted on how it works out.

Happened again and this time I got a screenshot. I have been using Safari as I also thought this was supposed to be optimized for M1, but clearly something is not right; when I first open it, it shows it using 1GB of memory and it steadily increases over time until this happens. I have the MBA M1 with 8gb of RAM...

Thanks for this info! Sounds then like this is not a M1 early adopter issue, but an issue of how Safari and/or Big Sur handle websites that use browser memory? Something maybe that could be addressed in an update?