Adobe Applications saying there isn't enough memory

Normal PC, Windows 10 Pro, 32GB of memory, AMD 5700 XT GPU, lots of SSD storage.
Windows is 21H1 (19043.1348)

LAPTOP is a Dell 7740 with 32GB of memory, Radeon 3000 GPU and all SSD storage.
The SAME symptoms occur on BOTH systems.

I don't know if this is a general question, an application question, a configuration question, what. So if there's a better place to put this let me know so it can be moved...

By FAR, my largest memory and resource users are Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. And both display similar (seemingly the same) symptoms. Both applications use cache, temp files, and Photoshop uses scratch disks. Huge amounts of space are available for all of them.

As the applications are used, the amount of memory they consume increases, and when it gets to somewhere around 24 or more, (Lightroom routinely uses 10+ GB and Photoshop routinely 16+ GB) sometimes up to 28 GB one or the other (or both) applications fail on tasks with a popup that indicates they’re out of RAM. Most often it’s Photoshop that encounters problems but I’ve had Lightroom fail trying to send an image to Photoshop with a memory error.

If both Lightroom and Photoshop are up and running, there are other applications that attempt to allocate more memory – Helicon Focus for example, which tries to allocate additional memory and regularly fails trying to allocation 150-180 MB unless I exit from Photoshop.

I’ve provided a bunch of Adobe-ish information with the posts in the Adobe Photoshop forums, since that’s the application that most frequently shows the error, but so far there’s been no solution.

It APPEARS to me, with my very limited knowledge of what Windows is doing, that somebody (or more than one somebody) isn’t using the virtual memory that’s available, so I’m trying to figure out the best configuration for Windows memory setup. My presumption is that as these memory-hungry applications demand additional memory when “real” physical memory isn’t sufficient, they’re supposed to use the virtual memory that’s configured. This doesn’t appear to be happening, but again, I’m not sure how Windows OR Adobe treats memory.

CURRENTLY, on the desktop there is a “System managed size” paging file on the “C” drive that’s currently about 8.8 GB. There’s a second “System managed size” paging file on a separate storage device that’s currently about 6 GB. The “C” partition has 22GB of free space and the other device with a page file has 50GB+ of available space.

The virtual memory display says the minimum size is 16MB, recommended is 4981 MB and currently allocated is 13513MB.
The laptop is similar but has more virtual memory. It does pretty much the same thing – throws out of memory popup errors in Photoshop.

Is there SOME different way I should have virtual memory set up? Is there some way for "encourage" applications to USE the virtual memory? Or even to find out who isn’t playing nice?

Hi,

I use photoshop a lot but never with files as large as you.

It is very possible that to run both applications comfortably, you may need more than 32 gig ram.

Lightroom has been seen going more than 20Gb And photoshop even more.

Have you tried the OverridePhysicalMemoryMB registry fix ?

I would set the page File to a fixed sized as big as the memory.
then:
Enable large system cache.
Disable paging executive.
Disable prefetcher.
Disable Superfetch.
Force both application to use only the Main GPU if more than one is available.
And if all fails. Upgrade to 64Gb Ram

Hi,
Does your system show system reserved on memory and if so how much
Task manager/ performance/ memory.

Hello Gracie,

Set it to System Managed, reboot, and test again if necessary:
Manage Virtual Memory Pagefile in Windows 10

I don’t think I’m using particularly large files… Yes, there are images from a Nikon D850, but those are only 45 megapixel, which is pretty average these days. And I’ve been using it since 2017 but don’t recall ever seeing this kind of memory issues until PS 2021 – though I’m not sure I’d remember if it was really rare. But this SEEMS to be something that became a problem in the last couple years.
I’ll have to find and try the registry fix. Didn’t know it existed.
For the others I’ll have to check and see about cache and prefetch and such.

ThrashZone, are you talking about in the Task Manager? If so, at the moment, Lightroom and Photoshop are open, but I haven’t done anything yet, they’re just sitting there. PS doesn’t even have any images open, and Lightroom is just sitting in the Library.

Here’s what the memory looks like in the Task manager:


This system is a few years old, and doesn’t meet Windows 11 requirements, so it’s not worth spending a bunch on another 32 GB of memory. I’ve resigned myself to having to put 64 GB in the next editing system I build. I'll try doing the stuff recommended here.

- - - Updated - - -

OverridePhysicalMemoryMB is set to 32768 dec
Large system cache is set to 0 (desktop) (no change)
Disable Paging Executive now set to 1 (disable) (change)
Sysmain (superfetch) disabled (change)
I only have on GPU – there’s non on the motherboard…

Steve108, I don’t have a problem letting Windows manage everything, but I’ve currently got 2 pagefiles. One is on the O/S drive “C” which has about 10GB of free space at the moment with a pagefile about about 8 GB. Do I need to increase that partition another 10 or 20 GB so there's more free space if the system needs to page more?

The other pagefile is on “Z”, on a separate SSD, and there’s 80GB of free space there. It’s a partition only used for paging.
They’re both currently set to “System Managed size”. I’ve just set “Let Windows Manage all drives”, but will it make any difference since they’re both already system managed?

Hello Gracie,
I think it's fine then if you have some drives set to system managed for paging file.

@GracieAllen, It should be ok, Try to reproduce the problem, see if it helped.

I don’t know if it’s fixed or not, or which of the changes may have improved things, but the system SEEMS to be doing a better job of playing nicely.

I loaded about a dozen, large, multi-layered images into Photoshop from Lightroom. Photoshop got up to just under 20GB then backed down to about 18. LR was at about 3GB. I then had Lightroom start importing and building 1:1 previews on a few hundred D850 images. It started accumulating memory. I then started it building a 9-shot panorama in Lightroom.

I started Bridge and had it open and load a couple average folders - a few thousand images.

I started Topaz Denoise and had it open and process 5 D850 images.

At this point, the Task Manager showed the system having memory at 31.4 of 31.9 GB, CPU was 100% busy, HDD was 100% busy, SSDs were around 30% busy. There's NOTHING needed for normal processing on a HDD so I checked and one of the partitions on the HDD is used for games environments/contexts and it has NEVER HAD a pagefile. It now DOES. There's a 26GB pagefile on drive "G" and I presume this is what was getting its brains beat out (more on this later).

During all this, Photoshop memory dropped from over 19 to under 10 GB, while Lightroom increased from 2 to 14GB. At one point, Photoshop wasn't processing anything, just sitting with a couple dozen very large images open, was down to less than 2GB.

I then took one of the images in Photoshop, did a select subject and pulled it into Select and Mask, did extensive edge detection and so on and some intensive processing. Photoshop slowly processed but didn’t increase memory usage much. Started doing brushing and large spot healing and memory increased slightly - around 4GB or so.

In Lightroom I selected a 12-image HDR/panorama and told Lightroom to process it.

I sent a 9-image panorama from Lightroom to Bridge to Photoshop. This appeared to be the final straw...

Lightroom failed with a meaningless “Unable to process” error - this is NOT unusual as I've NEVER successfully had Lightroom complete and HDR/Pano - and a few seconds later the whole system crashed to a black screen – no feed to the monitor.

BUT, for at least 20 minutes, with the system extremely overtaxed it processed and I could watch the amount of memory Lightroom and Photoshop and other applications change up and down.

AND, a couple OTHER things happened…
On the “C” drive, the swapfile, which has always been right around 16 MB increased to 268 MB – still very tiny, but a WHOLE lot bigger than it was.

The System Managed Pagefile on drive “C” is GONE. It was 8.8 GB when I rebooted prior to testing, it’s now not there. Not listed, no physical file. A NEW 26GB pagefile was created on a drive used to store game environments and where there has NEVER been one because its an HDD. I don't want one on that drive.
AND, the 5 GB pagefile that WAS on “Z” still exists, but it is NOT listed in the pagefiles on drives.

When the system crashed it left 3 Photoshop temp files totaling about 31 GB… this is normal when you crash the system but it shows that Photoshop was doing some work. I didn't look to see how much scratch drive space was in use, but it MAY have been that Photoshop actually HAD to reduce efficiency below 100% and use the scratch drives. In the past even when Photoshop declared it didn't have enough memory to process something, the Efficiency NEVER dropped below 100%.

I don't recall reading anywhere that when you elect to have "Windows manage paging file size for all drives" set, it may create a new pagefile on a drive, remove a pagefile from a drive or ignore an existing pagefile... I don't KNOW if Windows ignored the pagefile created on drive "Z", but in the Disk Management screen neither "C" nor "Z" show Page Files and "G" does...

I'm going to go back in and recreate the pagefiles where I want them, then turn "Windows manage paging file size for all drives" back on and reboot to see if Windows does anything. Then I'll try doing some NORMAL processing.

BUT, is what I'm seeing with the pagefiles normal behavior?

If you let Windows manage the paging file for all drives, it will pick the fastest drive from what I've read.

You should be able to select which drives you want it to use for paging file and disable it for the others. I use a fixed size on C: required for crash dumps and let Windows system manage paging file on my other SSD.

@GracieAllen, Loll, you should give your Technique to HeavyLoad and BurnInTest...

Aside the minimum requirement for dump files on C:\

For a graphic Workstation made with consumer grade storage. having only one big Pagefile on a separate SSD. And another SSD for the Scratch space would be the best you can get.

To rinse a Workstation like that you need enterprise grade Multi SAS 12GB/s in Raid0 and probably a MB that has A lot of ECC memory.

I didn't read your reply correctly: To set DisablePagingExecutive to off it must be set to 1. The paging executive setting in Windows is used to load system files such as the kernel and hardware drivers to the page file when needed, disabling this will prevent windows from Paging Kernel and drivers and should keep your system snappier under heavy loads.