Constant memory issues.

[blackjackmark]

I have a Mac Mini 2023 version (I think it has the M1) with the standard 8gb RAM. I am not at all a power user and just use it for mail, web browsing, finance tracking with Quicken, and occasional small Excel spreadsheets or Word documents.

I have recently started getting the “your Mac is out of memory” warning and asking me to force quit some open programs to continue.

It’s odd that this has only recently stated to be an issue so I’m not sure if a new OS is hogging resources or what’s going on.

I do see that Safari and Chrome are HUGE memory hogs, both approaching 8gb with very few tabs open. I use Chrome for some work stuff that doesn’t play well with Safari so I do often have both open. But again, that had not been an issue until the past few months.

Looking for suggestions as to what I can do to resolve this, short of buying a new Mac with 16gb+ of memory.

 

[maflynn]

What does your Activity Monitor show? How is the memory pressure?

Looking for suggestions as to what I can do to resolve this, short of buying a new Mac with 16gb+ of memory.

You're only options AFAIK, is to identify the memory hogs and curtail their use. Why not use one browser, Safari, not Chrome, or vice versa? I only use Firefox for instance.

Also rebooting will help in a short term sort of way.

In the end, though, you'll need to do some digging to see what's consuming the ram and the best included tool is activity monitor

 

[okkibs]

With such little memory the most effective workaround is to reboot the Mac regularly at least once a week. Depending on how bad the issue is you might need to reboot every 2-3 days. It can also help to exit and open both of the browsers again. That will unload all the open tabs and only takes a few seconds so it's less interruptive.

But if the issue occurs within a few hours from booting up then you really have too little memory. Memory demands only go up over the years and your Mac was already at the lowest possible memory spec when it came out in 2020 and was probably slightly overloaded with 2 browsers from the start. 5 years later the OS and apps have become more demanding and that pushed the low memory over the limit.

The dialogue to force close apps due to low memory usually only comes up when all other built-in methods to compress or otherwise save memory have failed and the Mac has already slowed down considerably. So chances are you'd have a much better time with a M4 Mini as these start with double the memory in the cheapest configurations, and pricing is decent as new M5 Macs are likely to come out this spring.

 

[blackjackmark]

Thanks for the great info. Just to clarify the Mac is only coming up on three years old (2023 M1). I know it’s the lowest memory possible but in the past it just seemed like Macs in general dealt with memory issues better than PCs so I assumed I’d get more life out of it than just three years.

 

[Bigwaff]

Thanks for the great info. Just to clarify the Mac is only coming up on three years old (2023 M1). I know it’s the lowest memory possible but in the past it just seemed like Macs in general dealt with memory issues better than PCs so I assumed I’d get more life out of it than just three years.

Safari is a memory hog but I've never run into memory issues on my M1 MBA 8GB, even with 20+ tabs open. You haven't provided any details on version of macOS and versions of your most used applications. My elder parent has the same M1 MBA 8GB, uses Safari, Firefox, Mail, MSOffice applications, etc and has never complained to me about memory issues, and I've noticed she never literally quits an application, just double-clicks app icon which opens a new window. Follow @maflynn advice, capture screen shot of Activity Monitor on Memory tab. Make sure to select menu View > All Processes first.

 

[blackjackmark]

All apps and OS are running the most current version.

 

[Tdude96]

Have you attached an external drive to it? I recently had this happen because Spotlight ran away trying to index an external drive. I wound up having to disable Spotlight indexing for that drive.

 

[blackjackmark]

Have you attached an external drive to it? I recently had this happen because Spotlight ran away trying to index an external drive. I wound up having to disable Spotlight indexing for that drive.

Actually I did! And that may correlate with when this started.

I’ll give that a try and see if it helps!

 

[TarkinDale]

I have had a lot of memory leak issues with Tahoe (see my post elsewhere about a 120GB memory usage by Pages). So 32GB of ram wasn't saving me. I've followed a suggestion and turned off Apple intelligence, and while it hasn't been long, so far that seems to be helping. Might be worth trying.

 

[chabig]

I have recently started getting the “your Mac is out of memory” warning and asking me to force quit some open programs to continue.

It would be helpful if you'd post a screenshot of the Memory tab of Activity Monitor.

 

[blackjackmark]

I have had a lot of memory leak issues with Tahoe (see my post elsewhere about a 120GB memory usage by Pages). So 32GB of ram wasn't saving me. I've followed a suggestion and turned off Apple intelligence, and while it hasn't been long, so far that seems to be helping. Might be worth trying.

Thanks! I believe my issue predates AI but it’s worth a try!