Lightroom continually maxing out memory

[robin_2]

Lightroom Version Number

15.3

Operating System

1. macOS 15 Sequoia

I'm having recurring issues with Lightroom maxing out my computer memory on an M3 Macbook pro.

I have 64Gb internal memory, and Lightroom just keeps adding pressure, until it gets to using around 50GB memory, then the pop up box appears to warn me I am about to run out of application memory. I quit lightroom and it drops down to around 7GB useage, before rising again as I edit.

As I can only work on one image per item in develop, why is there so much memory pressure? I have tried closing everything and just running Lightroom, and even then it just keeps rising until the Macbook can no longer cope.

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction, thanks.

 

[Ron-Alexander]

I have a newish 14" MBP M5 and I loaded LRC. Activity monitor shows MB in use, so I loaded a 100MBish tiff file and memory usage goes up to 2.45GB. You may be trying to load something really big like a panorama of tif's, or something else. My Mac and Lightroom Classic are current, I have 32GB, prior to this machine I only ever had 16GB and never had an issue. Applying 'what is different', I think it's the file(s) you are loading. I would figure out what it/they are and MOVE it/them out of the way to see if the problem folows the files or not.

 

[clee01l]

Maybe it is not unified memory, but swap file that is out of space ,, How much primary. free space do you have of temporary files and the swap file?

I have an M2 Ultra chip with 64gb of unified memory and never see this message. Quite possibly one of your other apps running has a memory leak and is not releasing memory.

 

[robin_2]

I have a newish 14" MBP M5 and I loaded LRC. Activity monitor shows MB in use, so I loaded a 100MBish tiff file and memory usage goes up to 2.45GB. You may be trying to load something really big like a panorama of tif's, or something else. My Mac and Lightroom Classic are current, I have 32GB, prior to this machine I only ever had 16GB and never had an issue. Applying 'what is different', I think it's the file(s) you are loading. I would figure out what it/they are and MOVE it/them out of the way to see if the problem folows the files or not.

It's not file size that is the issue - I am working through a catalog of standard RAW files.

 

[robin_2]

It's doing it on export now as well - maxxing out at 52GB just to export a catalog. I've no option other than to force quit and try to start again. The Macbook has 60% free space on there for memory swap. Not sure why it is doing this?

 

[Gnits]

How many images in the catalog. Exporting a catalog can be a big deal. Are you also moving the images. Is the catalog on the system drive or is it on an external drive. What drive is the target catalog on. What is the spec of the target drive.

Getting back to basics.
1. How much free space in your system drive.
2. When is the last time you cleared the trash.
3. How often do you reboot your Mac
4. Have you setting to save metadata to xmp. This can really have a profound impact on performance.
5. Do you make extensive use of Ai tools such as Denoise, Ai filters, etc.
6. What is the size of the raw files you are editing, I moved from Sony a7riii to a7RV and my highly specified PC just slowed to an awful unusable crawl.
7. When importing images how do you handle creation of previews.
8. What is your default preview size… mine is set to 2048 on a 4k screen, because for me I mostly keep at least one side panel active and never (or rarely) view or edit images where they occupy the full screen. I have seen people with massively high preview default sizes, which can really impact performance.
9. If you have performance issues .. leave sharpening and Denoise as final steps in your post processing routine. [But recent Ai routines now demand perhaps a conflicting sequence of post processing steps]



So.. there are a massive number of factors which influence performance. Resolving performance issues usually revolves around fine tuning lots of little things rather than a single magic bullet.

 

[Ron-Alexander]

It's not file size that is the issue - I am working through a catalog of standard RAW files.

It's doing it on export now as well - maxxing out at 52GB just to export a catalog. I've no option other than to force quit and try to start again. The Macbook has 60% free space on there for memory swap. Not sure why it is doing this?

First of all, what app are you using to show that memory display.
Can you show us via a screen grab the following (make sure to wait for storage to settle down, it takes 30 to 30 secs at least)
In activity monitor click the Memory tab at the top then screen grab the bottom.

 

[Zenon]

About Gnits #1 reply. LrC requires 20% of free hard drive space. Unofficial rule of thumb is 100GB.

I'm not sure how much this would impact your issue but how big are your Import Presets? You can check that by opening the Catalogue Previews dialogue box - Previews.

Did you modify the Camera Raw Settings Cache size? That can be found in Preferences - Performance. How big is it. Not sure I that may be contributing.

Here is a helpful link I follow pretty carefully.

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html

Lastly if you still have issues. This is safe to use and can identify issues. You can send reports to the Apple community.

https://etrecheck.com/en/index.html

 

[Conrad Chavez]

Just helping to clarify what you see in the screen shot in the first post, because I’ve run into it a few times…

That is a macOS emergency warning about RAM usage specifically. The user should normally never see that warning.
It is not directly related to being out of virtual memory swap space, although running out of VM space can be a side effect.

I’ve seen this error several times over the years (the pictures below are from a few years ago), and in my opinion this is the result of a memory management bug in the application or in macOS.
In other words, I think this warning is probably not directly caused by anything the user is specifically doing wrong, and probably can’t be addressed by checking settings.

On my MacBook Pro with 32GB unified memory, I’ve seen other Adobe applications trigger this memory in the past. The screen shots below are from 2022 and 2024. In those cases I was not doing anything especially demanding, so it can be difficult to troubleshoot on the user end. This contributes to my suspicion that it could be, for example, an unanticipated memory leak in the application or the OS that needs to be fixed on that end.

For example, when Adobe Media Encoder and Premiere Pro went out of control in the picture below, I was very puzzled because I was only rendering a series of simple sequences of just cuts and maybe a fade or two, one video track and one audio track, almost the simplest editing you can do. No special effects, no large frame sizes. Same with Bridge…how complicated can you get in a file browser? But in both cases the Adobe apps were requesting many times the amount of actual RAM was on the memory chips, and 32GB is not minimal. So I figured…that’s a bug.

The point of this post is that might not be much that can be done on the user end to prevent that warning. Something is spiraling out of control in memory management that may be outside the control of the user. That’s just my opinion, of course; would be good to hear from Adobe about what might really be happening. (Yes, I submitted bug reports when these screen shots were made years ago. And I haven’t recently seen that error in those applications.)

So what can robin_2 do? I’m not sure because the problem can be so unpredictable. Aside from restarting, I see that LoupeDeck is in the application list, and that gives me the idea to maybe try disabling Lightroom Classic plug-ins (only temporarily), in case a plug-in (LoupeDeck integration?) is interacting weirdly with Lightroom Classic memory management. You can also try the same “process of elimination” test with third-party background processes running in macOS. I never figured out what caused it on my Mac, it just stopped happening after a while.

 

[Ron-Alexander]

I'm having recurring issues with Lightroom maxing out my computer memory on an M3 Macbook pro.

I have 64Gb internal memory, and Lightroom just keeps adding pressure, until it gets to using around 50GB memory, then the pop up box appears to warn me I am about to run out of application memory. I quit lightroom and it drops down to around 7GB useage, before rising again as I edit.

As I can only work on one image per item in develop, why is there so much memory pressure? I have tried closing everything and just running Lightroom, and even then it just keeps rising until the Macbook can no longer cope.

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction, thanks.

View attachment 29047

What app is that, I have never seen it and it looks handy. I am on Tahoe 26.4.1

 

[Conrad Chavez]

What app is that, I have never seen it and it looks handy. I am on Tahoe 26.4.1

If you mean the Force Quit Applications alert shown in the first post, that isn’t a handy app; it’s a serious error message that macOS can display when memory is overwhelmed. You never want to see that window because when it appears, things have gone very wrong.

If you want a handy way to watch memory usage on your Mac, open Activity Monitor (it’s in the Utilities folder), click the Memory tab, and watch the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom of that window. As long as the graph is green, everything’s fine.