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TECHNOLOGY
Monterey Memory Leaks “Your system has run out of application memory.”
What happened to swap?
I recently mentioned that I had changed my cursor color and slightly increased its size on my computer. This is quite helpful for those of us with older eyes who don’t know where our reading glasses might be.
A few days later I suddenly experienced a “Your system has run out of application memory” error and Activity Monitor confirmed that.
Huh? How could that be? Yes, my system is only 8GB of RAM, but I was only running a few Safari tabs and a Numbers spreadsheet. I had been neglectful about emptying my Trash, but there shouldn’t have been any need for unusual swap usage.
When computer apps use too much RAM (working memory) the operating system has two ways of dealing with it. One is to “page out” some of the memory that apps are not using frequently. Usually this keeps the pressure on memory low enough that we don’t even notice and those pages can be quickly brought back when needed. When things get really out of hand, the operating system will “swap”, writing the memory of entire apps out to disk. If…
