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your system has run out of application memory

what does this message mean and what is the resolution:


your system has run out of application memory

Mac mini, macOS 11.1

Posted on Jan 12, 2021 4:49 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 12, 2021 7:51 PM

1 of 2 things


A) your boot disk is out of free space (or very near), and macOS can not create page/swap files to off-load virtual memory contents into. This is almost never the case, but sometimes users do fill up their boot disk.


B) You have an process (or set of processes) that are consuming huge amounts of virtual memory. As macOS gives out requested virtual memory address space, it needs to create page tables in kernel memory. If a process (or set of processes) asks for so much virtual memory that macOS starts to consume all of available RAM with page tables, then macOS cannot give any memory to your applications, and you get the dialog box.


Generally if B) is the cause, you are either running some very memory intensive applications, such as video editing, audio editing with tons of sound tracks, large format graphic editing, or all of them at once. Or you have a process that has a memory leak. It will ask for some virtual memory address space. Use the address space, forget to give the address space back to macOS, ask for virtual memory address space, uses the space, forget, ask, use, forget, etc... and eventually the process is assigned 100's of gigabytes of virtual memory address space, and macOS has so many page table entries keeping track of that address space that there is no real memory left for anything but the kernel and the defective program to run.


You can use Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor -> View -> All Processes -> Memory tab to see what processes are consuming all the virtual memory address space.

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 12, 2021 7:51 PM in response to LouisLok

1 of 2 things


A) your boot disk is out of free space (or very near), and macOS can not create page/swap files to off-load virtual memory contents into. This is almost never the case, but sometimes users do fill up their boot disk.


B) You have an process (or set of processes) that are consuming huge amounts of virtual memory. As macOS gives out requested virtual memory address space, it needs to create page tables in kernel memory. If a process (or set of processes) asks for so much virtual memory that macOS starts to consume all of available RAM with page tables, then macOS cannot give any memory to your applications, and you get the dialog box.


Generally if B) is the cause, you are either running some very memory intensive applications, such as video editing, audio editing with tons of sound tracks, large format graphic editing, or all of them at once. Or you have a process that has a memory leak. It will ask for some virtual memory address space. Use the address space, forget to give the address space back to macOS, ask for virtual memory address space, uses the space, forget, ask, use, forget, etc... and eventually the process is assigned 100's of gigabytes of virtual memory address space, and macOS has so many page table entries keeping track of that address space that there is no real memory left for anything but the kernel and the defective program to run.


You can use Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor -> View -> All Processes -> Memory tab to see what processes are consuming all the virtual memory address space.

your system has run out of application memory

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