macOS 26 Tahoe: System runs out of application memory (M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD)

AlanHirshberg wrote:

I'm having the same issue. This is happening on both my M2 MacBook Pro and my M4 Mini. Started a day after upgrading both systems from Tahoe 26.01 to Tahoe 26.1. Hopefully Apple will have a patch. You should all report this as a bug to Product Feedback - Apple

It's possible that there is a bug, but since many (or most) people are not experiencing this, it is also possible that something in your installation is involved. You may think that it's a bug because it's happening in both macs, but they probably share most of the same software.

You could run Etrecheck and post its report here, we may find something.

What happens in Safe Mode?

I had the same problem on my MacBook Air M2 with OS 26.0.1. I upgraded to OS 26.1 and the Mac works fine, but I also rebuilt the Spotlight index.

Multi-MacMan wrote:

Um - my device is shut down after every use, so it’s been restarted multiple times since this issue appears. Restarting has not been a solution.

I’ll TRY the Safe Boot, but I shouldn’t have to run my device that way just because of an upgrade.

As I wrote before, if the problem disappears in Safe Mode, it will show that the problem is caused by some third party software. Quite often, old stuff breaks after an OS upgrade.

Okay a little bit of help from ChatGPT went a long way. Ask it for terminal commands to clear out old cached files. Especially Adobe. This freed up 150gigs of space and things, knock on wood, are running fine now. It is very typical of Apple and Adobe not being in sync. Admins stop telling people to restart as if that will solve it. Do more research and support better.

Tahoe, or at least 26.0.1, seems to have trouble detecting that RAM is free after it has filled, so when it flushes caches and swaps out data it still can't resume paused applications, either automatically or manually. That seems to be combining with a bugs/bad optimisations causing significant memory usage (10s of GB) from safari and mail.

The Safari leakage may not entirely be apple's fault: Google is known to deliberately make non-compliant JS libraries that leak memory in non-chromium browsers, but unlike Mozilla Apple just regard that as a site bug and close issues as WONTFIX rather than implement a quirks mode. I don't use any Google apps, but who knows what libraries sites might be using.

I'll install 26.1 tonight and see if that makes the problem go away.

Did you test in Safe Mode? Does the same problem occur in Safe Mode?

Multi-MacMan wrote:

...I shouldn’t have to run my device that way just because of an upgrade.

If you have extensions that are not fully compatible with the new version of macOS, memory leaks can be one of the problems caused by that. We both have an M4 Pro MBP with 48 GB memory and 2 TB storage, but my memory usage looks like this, with low Pressure and no Swap being used:

If your Mac is running out of memory, it's not because of Tahoe but because of something you're running on your Mac.

Same issue. Almost no other apps open except Mail and Safari and I get the out of application memory error and computer freezes. MacBook Pro 14 16GB. Once it said Apple Mail was taking 96 GB. Just now froze with Safari saying 24 GB. Just upgraded to Tahoe a week ago. Never saw this issue before. Have not installed new software, so no it isn't a third party software issue. It is the two Apple apps.

NotSoTechnical wrote:

not Apple’s responsibility to make macOS compatible with everything.

Disagree because everyone reporting this has only one thing in common — Tahoe — and that this is consistently being observed after a period of inactivity/sleep.

I don't have any Adobe apps installed.

Yes, individual app developers need to maintain compatibility, but the OS clearly needs to do a better job identifying when this issue is occurring, and take some proactive steps to avoid the whole system pausing.

That it's happening across a mix of 3rd-party apps, or a common Apple app, is where it gets hard to identify.

I think that just proves the point. At the end of the day, this seems to affect a relatively small number of users. There are thousands of apps and extensions out there, if it was Apple’s goal to test everything in every possible combination and ensure compatibility, we might see macOS 26 sometime in 2035.

Also worth noting that hardware can be a factor. A few years ago, my 2019 i9 MBP would give spinning beach balls and bog down every time I ran Microsoft Teams. Turned out the actual problem was that I had a failing RAM module. Teams was using a lot of RAM, but the real problem wasn’t the software.

Alex Kim wrote:

Hope they fix this very soon...

This happens every year, and has happened every year for at least a decade. I'm not talking about Apple. I'm talking about end users thinking Apple is going to "fix this very soon". This is not going to happen.

Most likely, this problem is caused by some 3rd party system modification that isn't compatible with Tahoe. Anyone experiencing this problem won't see any improvement until they remove the software that causes it, or the developers of said software notice the problem and fix it. Unfortunately, much such software was already abandoned years ago.

It definitely won't be fixed in Tahoe. Tahoe is already dead. Apple is already hard at work on macOS 27 that will introduce a whole new set of bugs, just like these, that users will be complaining about in early fall 2026.

Note that this forum is for Users helping Users. Apple engineers may see these comments, but there's no guarantee.

At this point, I haven't seen any fixes across the internet for this issue, but it's easy to avoid by quitting running apps before putting the machine to Sleep. At least that's worked for me.

Use the Feedback Assistant app on your Mac to submit your feedback to Apple directly.

I've upgraded to 26.1 with high hopes, but no joy. Launching Mail still runs wild through memory. I've opened Activity Monitor after a restart, and Mail is using 11 GB of memory to start. It goes up to 103GB of memory including swapping before "pausing" Mail, and requiring a force quit. Then, I have to force quit Activity Monitor as well.

Meanwhile, on my 2024 Apple MacBook Air with an M3 chip and 24 GB of aphyciacl memory running 15.1, opening Mail shows that it takes a total of 89.2 MB - not gigabytes, but megabytes - of memory to run the Mail app.

I have not seen or heard a solution other than "gosh, you must have some old extensions out there". Sorry, but I think this is a Tahoe 26 issue.

Yes, it's a temporary glitch, a simple restart would likely fix this.

Problem seems to have gone away in OS 26.1