Abnormally high memory usage in InDesign CC

[D A]

A colleague at work is having some memory issues at work with his late 2015 retina 5k iMac. After a couple of hours of work the memory usage of InDesign is over 60 GB and kernel_task uses nearly 10 GB.

As the iMac only has 16 GB of RAM the swap file has grown to over 50 GB, making the computer unusable.

I've checked the system log and nothing stands out as to what may cause the memory usage to grow to such a level. Even after a few minutes of letting InDesign sitting idle with a document open causes the swap file to grow to 2 GB.

I'm out of ideas of what to do to fix the problem, and it has to be resolved or he won't be able to work properly.

Anyone seen anything like this before?

 

[MacGizmo]

Hopefully your colleague got a 27" iMac... because the answer is he should have known that using Adobe apps at any respectable level requires 32GB of RAM. You could run it with 16GB, but as you see, it's not optimal. Tell him to spend $100 to get more RAM—the 27" iMac is user-upgradable RAM.

That being said, with the exception of Photoshop Adobe apps have been notoriously bad RAM managers and there's little he can do beside simply quitting InDesign once in a while.

 

[AppleSmack]

32gb would be great, though I've found Creative Cloud runs just fine for graphic design and production under 16gb. And that's not by choice, but whatever machine I have to work on at my freelance gigs.

Uninstall all of creative cloud, then run the cleaner tool found here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

Then reinstall, and see if that helps out. Such high memory usage is not normal.