application memory problem

[Bruce Whittington]

I received a message saying the "system has run out of application memory." This was after I tried to force quit Nikon View NXi (the poor replacement for the discontinued View NX2). The only other apps open were Mail and the Finder. I had been transferring a lot of files with a USB stick from this desktop to my laptop but was finished that. View NXi has been a real problem, crashing frequently. I cannot go back to View NX2 because I missed an update before I upgraded the OS to El Capitan. (NX2 works fine on my laptop, same OS, but on that machine I did the software update before I upgraded the OS.) I found some references to the application memory problem on line. Some say it is an OS problem but I wonder if it has something to do with the Nikon software. I am not too familiar with Activity Monitor but checked it and it showed (I think) app use of 7.3 GB of 8 GB available and the window was almost all yellow. When I did force quit the app, the memory usage dropped to around 2GB, and the yellow was gradually reduced and replaced by a green bar. Is this a known Apple issue and if not, are there steps I can take to further diagnose it? I am going to try a shutdown now and monitor what happens.

 

[chas_m]

Broadly speaking this suggests an application that has a "memory leak" and gradually uses up all available RAM, which is what sounds like happened to you. As you noted, quitting the application helps clear that issue (if that is the issue), and so does a restart.