Q: Your System has Run out of Application memory

You needs to look up how memory management works.

Drew, you can continue your full-throated defense of the almighty kernel and it's use of insane amounts of RAM to handle who knows what 3rd party add-on, app, software, whatever. You may not suspect the OS, but seeing how many of us posters first encountered this issue after upgrading to Mavericks, well, that's my first suspect.

I suppose all of us posters are using the same "bad" whatever (add-on, software, etc.) that is causing the kernal to work so hard, I dunno. What I do know is that I was forced to restart my machine because everything I was using stopped responding and the OS gave me the Your System has Run out of Application memory message, which I resolved by restarting my machine. Of course, that was after I went looking for clues in the activity monitor and saw the kernel eating up 4GB+ or RAM. Since the restart, kernel use of RAM has dropped to 750mb or so. Oh, and there has been no change in the software, apps I was using pre-restart.

As I previously wrote, I'm hoping it's a freak occurence that doesn't happen again. If it does, I'll look again in the forums to see if anyone has identified the source of the kernel's need to use so much RAM; or maybe the OS will do us all a favor and proactivley identify the source of its need to work so hard.

Those who are implying in this thread that users have done something wrong (like installed 3rd party software) to cause apple Mail apps to eat all of RAM seem to be misunderstanding the core problem here. There is a serious bug in apple Mail or some of the API's that it uses on Mavericks. It's affecting probably thousands of users. This is just one of many threads on the net about the bug. I know that apple is actively working on a solution.

Drew, I know exactly how virtual memory works and how the kernel is supposed to use ram. It's not appropriate for the kernel to start eating about 500k a second until all actual ram (I have 16 gig) is used and then all free hard disk space is used for swap (I have about 30 gig free.) At that point all of your apps are swapped out and the system is hung hard since the window manager is paged out. Also, Mail seems to relaunch itself often and apple has some mail related background tasks that will run and do that same thing. I'm rebooting my mac from hangs 2 or 3 times daily and I have to force quit Mail as it will launch on it's own every few hours. I've moved com.apple.MailServiceAgent to the desktop so that won't run in the background. Meanwhile I'm struggling to handle all of my personal and job related mail across multiple accounts in various web mail clients (that all suck) without any smart folders, mail folders or rules that I've set up over 15 years to manage my volume of mail.

Those of us who've been unable to run mail on our machines for two weeks know very well that we didn't do anything wrong other than maybe upgrade before apple had worked out all the issues. Or maybe I'm just a bad person and I deserve what I get.

I don't doubt there are bugs in Mail and across the OS.

Can you reproduce them in safe mode?

10.9 is the first generation so it is bound to have memory issues, especially since it has new ways to handle that memory, all early OS X releases did have memory bugs. I just think the best course of action is to look at what is running & see if some of it can be removed or updated.

Running a StartupItem designed for 10.4 can't make for a stable 10.9 system can it? How about kernel level USB drivers from 2010?

It is Migration Assistant that brings all this crap over, so yes it probably is Mavericks fault, indirectly through the old software.

Take a look at your own EtreCheck report & see if you have any old kernel extensions or startupitems or failed launchd jobs. It seems more proactive than hoping for an Apple fix. Isn't it possible you have a background job or internet plugin that is causing memory to leak somewhere?

This is why safe mode is critical to debugging, it disables the third party software. Please try to reproduce the issue in safe mode.

Sorry, I should have made it clear: I get the same behavior in safe mode. It much more likely that this is a problem is related to Mavericks' handling of my mail account on the server. I've tried turning off my google account and other lesser accounts and it still happens with only my iClound account. I have not tried running mail with no internet connection but my guess is that it might be functional (but useless of course.)

The problem may be related to the fact that I opened the .mac account on the day that Steve jobs announced the service so there are a lot of mail messages up there. However, all previous systems handled this issue without any hickups as does iOS and the iCloud web interface.

I think apple needs a better test suite for Mail. They need to catch this stuff before it goes out the door.

I apologize but I did not have the time to read through the entire thread. Just want to throw my hat in the arena and say that there is indeed something wrong with 10.9. I have 16GB of RAM and running Aperture 3.5.1 earns me the dreaded out of application memory problem. 16GB of memory chewed up by the kernel and Aperture! Seriously, Apple??!!

We had the same crap happen with Aperture 3.something with one of the Lions. It took months for Apple to acknowledge the problem (and even longer for the fanboys to get over it .....)

Not to mention that the "fixed" multi-display mode broke a number of other applications and changed my workflow.

I hope it gets fixed faster this time around. On the other hand, I shouldn't be whining. Nobody put a gun to my head to abandon a stable, working version for the latest and greatest, even if I thought I QA tested it thoroughly ....

One more thing: as soon as I kill Aperture 3.5.1, the kernel size drops from huge to 1.5 GB (which is still too much, if you ask me). Since others are experiencing the same problems using other Apple apps, it seems logical that the problem is in a component that all of them use or rely on.

Message was edited by: sorinfromtoronto

AddressBookSourceSync is a runaway application in Maverick OS......  see below for how I resolved the issue.

The computer boots up fine and starts to work ok. After some time (2-3 hours or less), it starts to become very unresponsive with delayed input. If you look at the Activity Monitor, a process called AddressBookSourceSync is taking up all upwards of 12GB of application memory or more.  It eventually causes you to restart your system due to an "Application Memory is Insufficient" message.

Looking online, I found out that the Address Book or Contacts now uses CardDAV instead of the previous structure. As such, the OS needs to perform a conversion on the address data. Occasionally, the conversion does not properly sync with a record.  This causes the AddressBookSourceSync process to become a runaway application. I used the following to resolve this problem in Maverick.  It was taken from a similar issue involving the Lion OS:

- Export all contacts to a vCard file for safe keeping.

- Delete ~/Library --> Application Support --> Address Book.

- Reboot.

- Open System Preferences --> iCloud. Enable Contact Syncing.

- Click on Merge Data.

This caused my system to sync correctly. All of my contacts appeared in the Contacts list, and I am not seeing the AddressBookSourceSync top out at 12GB of application memory at this current time.

Yeah  Buddy, I hardly have anything installed because the Apple store wiped my drive and installed OS10.8.They had just rebuilt my laptop for the fixed fee. My list in the Applications folder below are all Apple software,

NONE ARE THIRD PARTY

App Store

Automator

Calculator

Calendar

Chess

Contacts

Dashboard

Dictionary

DVD Player

FaceTime

Font Book

Game Center

GarageBand

Google Chrome

iBooks

iDVD

Image Capture

iMovie

iPhoto

iTunes

iWeb

Launchpad

Mail

Maps

Messages

Mission Control

Notes

Photo Booth

Preview

QuickTime Player

Reminders

Safari

Stickies

System Preferences

TextEdit

Time Machine

Utilities

Question: do all of you happen to have a lot of calendars? (connected to several google calendars, for intance) My feeling is the problem may have something to do with the new way apple is handling that. survey?

I have 3 google accounts and FB connectd

one has 12 cals

second has 2 cals

third has 7 cals.

Question: do all of you happen to have a lot of calendars? (connected to several google calendars, for intance) My feeling is the problem may have something to do with the new way apple is handling that. survey?

I have 3 google accounts and FB connectd

one has 12 cals

second has 2 cals

third has 7 cals.

Did the store use Migration Assistant to bring over User data?

EtreCheck will list what is actually running.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

If it's entirely clean I would just return it to the store, they don't seem to have left it in a working state.

I'm also having the same problem. I have a Retina MacBook Pro with 16 GB of memory and a late 2013 iMac with 32 GB of memory. Both of them occasionally display the "system out of application memory" message and invite me to force quit paused applications. With that amount of physical memory plus disk swapping, this should be impossible, yet it just happened while I was using only two applications, Mail and Safari. Oh, and I've never heard of a "paused application" before, either.

I have never seen this error message before, not even in the iMac that had only 512MB of memory. Apparently this is a bug in Mavericks' memory management tricks, which makes sense because they are brand new and fancy. The developers must be very embarrassed, and their manager is probably metaphorically ready to rap their knuckles with a ruler.

I bet the fix is already in the works. I hope it makes it into 10.9.1.

I'd recommend creating a new thread with your system info. This is getting long with many different ideas on why the OS may be running out of Memory.

It's possible for system modifying 3rd party code is the reason for all your memory disappearing.

"NONE ARE THIRD PARTY"

That's what you said.

Google Chrome is, and it's a poorly written app that has caused issues for many users.

Remove it and test again.

Same problem here since I migrated to Mavericks.  I have a 32GB iMac bought 8 months ago.  I had thought 32GB would be enough.