Mavericks running out of "Application Memory" with 32 GB of RAM

I'm glad it seems better for you now.

It's just so annoying that it's so imprecise ('kill it all' doesn't seem like good advice 🙂), let us know if anything changes.

I have a same problem with the message even though there were only few Apps on the memory. I have neve ever experienced this kind of happening with such a message since I used mac.

Following is the pictrue that I captured. You can see only a few apps are opening. My memorey is 8G which is enough.

youngki, that picture is only a fraction of what is going on.

Next time it happens can you try opening Activity Monitor (inside /Applications/Utilities/). Select the memory tab & select 'All processes' from the popup menu at the top. Sort by memory usage so the largest processes are at the top & screenshot that please.

You are welcome to post an EtreCheck report or try the many other troubleshooting steps mentioned here.

I'd recommend creating your own thread, since this one is getting long & people are talking across each other. Just link to it if it gets no attention.

One thing the Apple support guys did for me was to do a total reset of the hardware. When the mac is powered down, hold the Shift, Control, Option, and the power buttons down together for about 10 seconds or so. After that, power up the machine just a normal. I think that fixed my problem... I hope...

This is my Mac Pro (Mid 2012) 2 x 2.4 GHz 6 - Core Intel Xeon Memory 64 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 after update of Maveric 10.9. I'm not a computer guy. I use this computer for video production only. No mail, music etc. Genius Bar didn't help. What next?

I added some notes to your screenshot …

What's next?

You give us a reason why your think you have issues? Describe what is wrong, have you seen the 'out of application memory' dialog?

Your screenshot is 100% fine! You have lots of RAM & the OS has not had to write to swap. Very little memory has been compressed. It's not even close to breaking into a sweat!

This explains mavericks new RAM system…

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/#compressed-memory

Note his second screengrab - it has compressed, run out of all physical memory and eventually run into swap. His 'file cache' decreased as the OS needed more RAM.

I can give you a command if you would like to witness how your system behaves with high memory pressure.

Thank for your help. That explains alot but like I said before I'm not a computer guy. The only thing I dont understand is my Final Cut pro start is working slowly when memory used reach 63.99GB. At that moment you can't even watch the movie file in movie player because it starts freezing. I didn't have this problem before system updates to Mavericks. Second thing is all those numbers and labels should be more understanding to regular user, but even the Genius Bar technition people dont understand the numbers and labels.

Other people here have mentioned support staff don't understand them either, it's unfortunate.

FCP needs good disk Input/Output, so if you have a lot of files on disk and are only working on the internal disk it could cause issues. Spinning disks get slower the more full they are, do you have an SSD or multiple disks?

Does the memory start compressing as the slowdown occurs (orange in graph) ?

Swapping out to disk will be shown as red.

Also look at CPU & disk IO to see if they increase to a maximum level after the slowdown.

You can post an EtreCheck report if you want to get feedback on what is installed on your system. It would make sense to start it in a new thread (perhaps in the FCP forums).

I don't have my computer now. It's in Genius Bar right now. I have one original internal disk 1TB plus 2 internal 3.0TB WD Caviar Green 64MB Cache SATA 3.0 6GB/s 3.5" Hard Drives and one 4 TB external for back up (time machine). When the file cache goes up the memory goes up too. What ever happen that was always green line in graph. When computer start freezing i notice that CPU on FCP was up to 850% I think that I'm too small for that.

The file cache is stored in memory so that makes perfect sense.

The basic idea is to store the most used files in RAM, that way if you quit an app (lets say Safari) and then launch it 3 hours later & view the same sites many of the resources can be loaded straight from RAM.

The alternative is either reading the files from disk (Safari's cache) or fetching them again over the network etc. Memory wins everytime for pure speed.

The file cache will be purged as soon as any app requests memory when none is available.

You can see the cache in effect by timing how long an app takes to launch, you should find that if you quit & relaunch the same app it takes less time, repeat a few times & compare the times.

In Terminal type the following to empty the cache (you'll need to be an admin)…

sudo purge

Open the app again & time it.

Take a look through the FCP forum for excessive CPU usage & freezing, your RAM looks OK in the screengrabs.

Thank you Drew 🙂

Hi Drew,

thanks for the explanation, it helped me getting rid of my memory problems.

I am quite happy now

🙂

I've rebooted my iMac and am watching the Inkjet4 Process consume memory. It started using 1GB of memory and in an hour this has gone up to 7.78GB!!! And that's without anyone printing anything.

I think we've found the problem (at least for my machine).

K.

Adding my experience to the original issue...

I have a new MBP (late 2013, with OS X Mavericks). It's an out-of-the-box machine; I did not use Migration Assistant to port any data or settings. Instead, I am using System Preferences/Internet Accounts to configure each of my many email accounts (all IMAP). System Preferences seems to have a few bugs in this regard, so I worked methodically in order to minimize flakiness: open System Preferences, add a single account, close System Preferences, open Mail, tweak Mail preferences for the account, close Mail. I monitored relevant plists during the process, and nothing was amiss.

As I added more accounts, the time for Mail to open (and sometimes to close) became excessive. Eventually, I hit the "out of application memory" wall. I removed a few accounts, and I was again able to open Mail successfully (albeit slowly). I de-activated more accounts, without removing them. Mail opened faster with each de-activated account. After reducing the number of active accounts to only a few, Mail opened (and closed) relatively quickly again.

I opened Activity Monitor to observe Mail's behavior. With only a few active accounts, when I opened Mail, mds_stores (part of the metadata server) was CPU intensive, followed by Mail. Mail would calm down roughly after the main window opened. Memory pressure was flat green throughout.

However, with several active accounts, when I opened Mail, mds_stores would light up, followed by Mail, followed by kernel_task, which then went crazy. Mail's memory usage was extremely high for a moment before dropping (though still high), at which point kernel_task would consume everything else. It was during this time that the memory pressure was in the red, pushing the ceiling. When the main window finally opened, Mail and kernel_task settled down, and the memory pressure returned to flat green. Funnily enough, I could then activate the remaining accounts from within mail, with no adverse effects.

In my case, there seems to be an issue with the number of Internet Accounts I have configured for Mail. If the number is above a threshold (about 7), opening Mail triggers some process that consumes excessive resources. Above a higher threshold (about 12), the resource consumption is unmanageable, and I get the "out of application memory" error. I should also note that choosing to activate accounts with few messages seems to make no difference to the thresholds.

As to my experience detailed above, an update to Mac OS X 10.9.1 did not correct the issue.