Your System has Run out of Application memory

You have a small internal drive, and it has very little free space left. It would appear that there is no longer sufficient space available for system and application caches, etc. You will need to clean house, move some stuff off your internal drive that you don't need on a daily basis and store that on an external disk.

Apple provides malware detection and removal as part of OS X. Apple takes responsibility for a secure OS so you do not have to worry.

Okay thanks. Removed almost every file I could find I wouldn't need regularly and got to 35Gb available. Few hours later and the storage is gone again. So still have the initial issue that the Mac runs out of storage fast

my system runs out of system memory every day.

launchd spans an app launchS which eats memory

use activity monitor, look at system memory

force quit launchS

i just fixed it again

do it everyday

i keep activity monitor open and just keep an eye on it

no reboot

the next time it gives me this message i will do some screen shot captures and include them in my post. should not be long happens almost everyday.

InstallerS came alive

where it came from

after force quit process

InstallerS is gone

best documentation i can do

Thank you. This issue was absolutely doing my head in. Thank you for the fix.

🙂

I am having the same problem. I bought the most powerful Macbook Pro available at stores last May to process neuroimaging data. Unfortunately I can't process the brain images because I get the "system has run out of application memory"error message half way through the preprocessing (in Matlab when running FASTER for EEGLab, specifically, on almost the smallest dataset that guy is designed to handle). I'm running OSX 10.9.5 on a 23 Ghz intel core i7 with 16 GB of memory. I do not have a partition or anything like that, and I've tried closing all other programs, turning off wifi and etc. The old, slow, and awful Windows desktops in our lab are able to process these images so my awesome Mac should be able to handle it. I am hoping Apple releases a fix soon; otherwise I've essentially purchased a very expensive word processor. Thanks.

Instead of posting at the bottom of this old post, you really should start your own thread where your problem can get the recognition it deserves.

In my case: Running Mavericks 10.9.2 with 18GB of RAM and "many" very large hard disks, it turned out that the kernel_task was filling up. The real culprit seemed to be the Dashboard process which although was only taking up a little over a gig of RAM, was driving the kernel_task to fill up. It also appeared to not be responding to commands. Disabling the entire Dashboard process from the command line:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES; killall Dock

Instantly brought the kernel_task down by about 10GB of RAM and the system is running fine now. To restore the dashboard (if you really need it, or this didn't do the trick for you is:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO; killall Dock

So far no problems for several days, and the kernel_task is no longer filling up.

(The reference tip on how to disable the dashboard process was from: http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/disable-dashboard-os-x/ )

JKane wrote:

...Instantly brought the kernel_task down by about 10GB of RAM and the system is running fine now....

NOTE: 10GB is an excessive amount of memory for the kernel_task to use. The kernel_task of an 18GB RAM system should be using on the order of 1GB to 1.5GB of RAM. If your just after boot kernel_task using is much above that, I would be looking at the 3rd party kernel extensions you have installed to see if they are being a little greedy.

I've just started having this issue with my late 2012 iMac.

Background - it has 32Gb of RAM and about 4 months ago the HDD was replaced under warranty when it failed.

Last week I got the 'Your System has Run out of Application memory' warning and I think it's to do with the Shockwave Flash plugin for FireFox as it was at one point using over 20Gb of my RAM.

Now I've have constant issue with FireFox and the plugin for years, with FF locking up leading to me force quitting the program or plugin to get it working again.

My solution is to now set the plugin to 'Ask to Activate' and only us it when needed. Now the iMac is only using about 8Gb of RAM.

I started to get the same issue after latest update.

I've installed the "memory clean" software and it shows over 3Gb of free app memory, I don't get it...

I keep getting the same issue over and over, and I constantly use the same apps with the same frequency and it never run out of app memory before.

My mac: MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2011)

Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory: 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Storage: 256 SSD

som6ra wrote:

I started to get the same issue after latest update.

I've installed the "memory clean" software and it shows over 3Gb of free app memory, I don't get it...

I keep getting the same issue over and over, and I constantly use the same apps with the same frequency and it never run out of app memory before.

My mac: MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2011)

Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory: 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Storage: 256 SSD

Uninstall "memory clean" as this is NOT a RAM usage problem, it is a "Virtual Address" problem.

You either have no more disk space to create /var/vm/swapfile(s) -OR- you have a process (or set of processes) that have requested more Virtual Address space than OS X is capable of managing. Virtual Address space is a "Promise" to give you RAM the program touches that region of address space, but until then the operating system may keep the data on disk. But to keep that promise, the operating system needs tables to manage this, and those tables are not infinite, so eventually if a process asks for too much address space, the operating system will run out of table space to make the promise, -OR- it will not be able to create more /var/vm/swapfiles(s) and issue the message "Your System has run out of Application Memory".

So if you are getting these errors and you have lots of free disk space, then chances are you have a process that is trying to use lots and lots of virtual address space, and that may or may not show up as RAM usage, as any data mapped into the process address space, but currently sitting on the disk, will be taking up virtual address space, but will not be showing up as process memory being used.

And things like your program code is memory mapped directly to the program file, and a process can use memory mapped files to access files, instead of using traditional file system read/write routines. These memory mapped files will NOT affect your /var/vm/swapfile(s) usage either, so you cannot always just look at how much space you are using there either.

From an Applications -> utilities -> Terminal session you can try issuing the

ps -o rss,vsz,ucomm -ax | sort -k2

command. This will display each process' real memory (RSS), then the Virtual Memory (VSZ). The sort will be against virtual memory usage, so you will get the largest consumers at the end of the list.

This DOES NOT mean the largest consumers are at fault, as it could be a collection of processes, such as a web browser that uses lots of subprocesses to display pages, and if there are enough of them , they add up.

My computer has been on slow meltdown for just under a week with the Application Memory issue. Did exactly as detailed in Ron's post and BOOM fixed - thank YOU!!!

The thing that seemed to do the trick instantly:

Delete the Calendar cache.

A rough procedure:

Open iCal

Full back up all calendars (full archive I think it's called)

Close iCal.

Go to Finder

'Go" menu

Hold down option key

Go to Library

In Library go to Calendar.

Delete Calendar Cache.

Restart machine.

Start iCal.