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system has run out of application memory

How to fix the error "system has run out of application memory"? I have open only word and safari and even if I force quit applications, the error returns many times.


MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.0

Posted on Dec 4, 2022 4:01 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 4, 2022 10:14 PM

What model Mac do you have? Click Apple menu then About This Mac. Need the model such as MacBook Pro 13" and the year.


How much RAM do you have? Found on that same About This Mac screen.


How much available (free) space do you have on your disk? System Settings -> General -> Storage


Are you running many open tabs in Safari? Have a large number of saved Tab Groups?


If all that shows there should be plenty of memory. i.e. you are not running with 4GB of RAM, you have plenty of free disk space, and you aren't running many tabs in Safari and those tabs are not processing JavaScript extensively. Then it's possible you might have some malware / adware installed that is consuming all your resources behind the scenes. We've found some people infected with crypto-currency software that was slowing things down tremendously. This sort of stuff hides itself rather well from the average Mac user. So if you could go to EtreCheck and download the software, follow the prompts to allow Full Disk Access, etc. Run the scan and then click the Share button and Copy and reply to this thread and click the Additional Text button and paste the report with CMD+V in the body of the Additional Text and give it a title. The report will not include any personal information. It just displays all the hardware and software and what's running. This will help us see what's going on and not have to spend a lot of time asking you to check various technical details.

15 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 4, 2022 10:14 PM in response to Lina1171

What model Mac do you have? Click Apple menu then About This Mac. Need the model such as MacBook Pro 13" and the year.


How much RAM do you have? Found on that same About This Mac screen.


How much available (free) space do you have on your disk? System Settings -> General -> Storage


Are you running many open tabs in Safari? Have a large number of saved Tab Groups?


If all that shows there should be plenty of memory. i.e. you are not running with 4GB of RAM, you have plenty of free disk space, and you aren't running many tabs in Safari and those tabs are not processing JavaScript extensively. Then it's possible you might have some malware / adware installed that is consuming all your resources behind the scenes. We've found some people infected with crypto-currency software that was slowing things down tremendously. This sort of stuff hides itself rather well from the average Mac user. So if you could go to EtreCheck and download the software, follow the prompts to allow Full Disk Access, etc. Run the scan and then click the Share button and Copy and reply to this thread and click the Additional Text button and paste the report with CMD+V in the body of the Additional Text and give it a title. The report will not include any personal information. It just displays all the hardware and software and what's running. This will help us see what's going on and not have to spend a lot of time asking you to check various technical details.

Dec 5, 2022 6:36 AM in response to Lina1171

Running out of Application Memory has 2 causes.


1) You may have run out of free storage on your boot device, which prevents macOS from creating page/swap files for virtual memory.


2) You may have a process (or several processes) that are consuming an excessive amount of virtual memory. 10, 20, 30 gigabytes or more. When this happens the macOS kernel ends up creating so many virtual memory page table entries to keep track of the virtual memory, that there is no real memory available for your applications to run.


Use Applications -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor -> View (menu) -> All Processes -> Memory (tab)

to see what processes are consuming all your virtual memory.

Dec 8, 2022 5:43 AM in response to Lina1171

There's an entry in the previous EtreCheck Report stating it was run with limited permissions.


Please go to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Full Disk Access and allow EtreCheck to have full disk access. Then re-run the EtreCheck scan and repost it as Additional Text.


That will give us more detail. While still not publishing anything personal.



Dec 8, 2022 7:02 AM in response to Lina1171

Still not seeing anything that jumps out. Can you run the following command?


In Terminal:


kextstat | grep -v com.apple; systemextensionsctl list > ~/Desktop/extensions.txt


It will list any kernel extensions that are not from Apple and any System Extensions and write the information to a text file on your Desktop called "extensions.txt". Open that file and copy / paste into the reply.


Make sure all your Apps are up-to-date with the newest available versions especially Fortinet and other security / VPN related Apps. You might need to check with your employer to obtain the newer installation packages. You've described a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) scenario which requires that you install these additional tools. Make sure those items are Ventura compatible because it is very common to need to upgrade such tools when upgrading macOS to a newer version.

system has run out of application memory

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