Application Memory is full!

[Randy B. Singer]

... this afternoon, I had an error message to say my application memory is full. the message box suggested to force quit. ...

So, this is going to throw everybody for a loop...

I've had users tell me that they have seen the above notice a handful of times now. In each and every instance, the problem had just about NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH PHYSICAL MEMORY (RAM), despite what the error message seems to clearly be saying.

Which makes sense if you think about it. If your Mac runs out of real RAM, it just hits your hard drive and it uses virtual memory. You will get a bit of a slowdown when this happens, but never an error message.

So, what is that error message usually about? It means that you are running out of contiguous hard drive space. And, in fact, you might still have many gigabytes of "free" hard drive space indicated if you do a Get Info on your hard drive. It's just that this remaining hard drive space is either/both being used for metadata, or it is badly fragmented and can't be used. (You may have heard that it's important to keep anywhere from 10% to 30% of your hard drive's space free. This is one of the situations that you are trying to avoid by doing that.)

When that error message occurs, it means that your Mac needed more memory than your Mac had available as real RAM, it hit the hard drive to use it as virtual memory, and it didn't find a big enough chunk of free contiguous space on your hard drive. Your Mac can't use fragmented memory as virtual memory...hence the error message.

See:

Macintosh Routine Maintenance

Item #5 and Note #1

 

[techiesteve]

Frank, I just went to roblox.com to investigate the Mac requirements for the Roblox game. When I clicked on that option it displayed:

Your current platform is not supported
You are on a Mac device. Roblox Requires at least Microsoft Windows 7 or Mac OS X 10.6.
To play Roblox, sign into Roblox.com on a computer running at least Microsoft Windows 7 or Mac OS X 10.6 (or newer).

On this MacBook Pro I too am running Mojave 10.14.6, but with 16GB memory. It appears that Roblox hasn't been updated for to run on a newer macOS. This could be causing an issue with your iMac.

All good and valid advice in the posts above. As you are concerned you might loose your letters contents as you can't save before re booting, you could try the following. This will provide a record of what you typed, but you will likely needed to type it in again if your word processor hasn't auto saved. Press command shift 4, then align the cursor in the top left of your letter, hold down the mouse, drag diagonally across the letter, then release the mouse. The grab should be viewable on your desktop. If this doesn't function and you have a smart phone, you could photograph the letter. Hoping you get the problems sorted.

I've only been to your county Pembrokeshire once, a lovely area. My usual stomping ground in Wales is around the Ogwen Valley, especially in the snow. I've camped there too, in the 2 camp sites along the A40. Unfortunately not possible now in the current climate. My 10yr old grandson plays Roblox, but on a Playstation.

Stay safe.

 

[pm-r]

My grandson is still playing Roblox on my Mac. Therefore he uses my Mac for his schooling. I don't have a laptop or tablet he can use.

Have you got him set up with his own user account and are you enforcing that he must always use it, and never use your account when using your Mac???

You don't really need a laptop or tablet he can use!!!


- Patrick
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