Maxed out memory on M1 Mac

[William Phillips]

My Mac will frequently report an out of memory error.  Most apps seem to be using the expected amount but my accordance will frequently show an excessive amount of memory  being used. Today it was 37.5 GB of memory (it has been higher).  This means I have to close down the program and restart.  This is surely a bug.  I've snooped around but don't see a mention of this problem which is somewhat frequent but yet irregular in occurrence. 

 

Any ideas as to a fix?

[Kristin]

Hi @William Phillips,

This is just a thought, but have you tried opening Accordance with the shift key? I had called Apple a long time ago about an unrelated program, but similar behavior. The rep told me to close the program, then open it while holding the shift key. Keep holding the shift key until the program is completely open. Then release it and close the program, repeating those steps a few times (I think 3x). I

 

don't entirely understand it, but she was saying that erases certain ram space, or something. I am not sure, but after that the program opened quicker and did not eat so much memory.

 

So I don't know if that is what is going on, but it would be worth a shot. Also, with Accordance if it acts odd, I do that also, closing it and opening it using shift a few times.

 

I hope this helps,

Kristin

[Steven S]

3 hours ago, Kristin said:

This is just a thought, but have you tried opening Accordance with the shift key?

 

I'm by no means a Mac person, but I'm always interested when I hear some or other "voodoo" among a community.  So, I looked up what holding Shift does when opening an application, and the answers in this Apple Support Community thread seem to explain it nicely.

[William Phillips]

Thank you both, Kristin and Steven. I will surely give it a few tries to see if that helps.  

 

I opened Accordance today and, after using if for an hour decided to check the memory usage of the programme. it was over 6.6 GB!  This seems beyond crazy crazy!!  So, rather than it causing a complete problem, or even forcing a re-boot I decided to close the programme while it was still responsive.  Trouble is, when I did, it wouldn't shut down! It remained responsive in the program except it just would not close down until I force-quit it.  Very strange (but the non-shutting down could be a drop-box issue).

 

BTW, I really don't have many, or large,  loaded resources so I don't think that could be it.

 

 

I would be interested to know if anyone else has this problem — whether on Windows or Mac.  Maybe maybe someone reading this could check their memory usage using Activity Monitor (on the Mac) or Task Manager (Windows)?

 

~~~~~~~~~~~

Experiments:

Restarted normally: About ~ 1.7 GB at startup.

 

Restarted with shift key: Just using (allotting?) 400 MB at startup. After a few moments and no real interaction on my part it became 1.69 GB. Hung again while attempting to quit Accordance (Dropbox stalled — closing its window did not mean I could quit Accordance normally).

 

 

 

[Kristin]

Hi @William Phillips,

 

Your Accordance using 6.6 GB sounds high to me too. On the Activity Monitor it says my Accordance is using 4.61 GB. That said, I have 8 Accordance windows open with each window averaging 7-10 tabs. So I don't think how much memory it is using is typical for Accordance users. My Accordance works fine like this. It only sometimes crashes if I upload a User Bible.

When you open Accordance is it starting with a complicated workspace window? I know sometimes when people have issues it is because a specific workspace is to blame.