How can I resolve 'Your system has run out of application memory'?

There are two possible reasons for this problem:

1) An application is using an inordinate amount of memory

2) The system drive is very low in free space.

First, select your system drive and press Command-I to open the Info window.

What does it say, regarding "available" and "purgeable" space?

NOTE: the free space is the "available" minus the "purgeable" - if that is low, there you are.

If there is plenty of space, you may want to keep Actitivy Monitor running, showing the Memory tab, and see if an application is using a lot of memory.

And finally, so we get a clearer picture, and may find possible causes of issues: Please run Etrecheck and post its full report here. Use the "additional text" button and paste the report into the text box.

1) You can select your system drive in various ways. The drive is usually called "Macintosh HD" - unless you have changed it, that is what you need to be looking for

a) select it right on the desktop - if it is showing (usually at the top right of your desktop); it could be that it is not showing there, though (it is a setting in Finder)

b) Open a new window in Finder (command-N); on the sidebar, under "Locations", click on "Macintosh HD"

c) In Finder, press Command-Shift-H to open your home folder; then press Command-UpArrow three times to go

three levels up, and click to select "Macintosh HD".

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2) Activity Monitor is an application that comes with every Mac; it is in /Applications/Utilities.

The easiest way to launch it is to press Command-space (which opens Spotlight), start typing Activi and pressing enter:

You can check how much of system resources is being used. Click the Memory tab since that is what interests us now:

You can see here, for example, that Safari is using 1.30GB.

If an application shows there using multiple GB this will be relevant for our discussion.

3) Etrecheck is a diagnostic utility by etresoft, a respected member of this community and frequent contributor. It was created precisely for us here to be able to better assist, by providing a report where we often find the causes of problems.

You can get it from the website etrecheck dot com

How many applications have you got open? Have you tried closing them and re-opening the ones you need.

If you've closed apps and you've still gettting the message open Terminal, type "sudo purge" (without the quote marks), hit return, then enter your password (must be an admin account) and hit enter. The password won't show when you type it.