Your system has run out of application memory

[Ambrosia7177]

I have a 2015 (?) Retina MBP with macOS Sierra, and starting about a week ago, I have started getting a pop-up with this message.

My system hasn't crashed yet, but one time I was on the phone using VoIP nd that made me freak out fearing I'd lose the call.

Recently I installed Nikon ViewNX-i and Adobe Lightroom on my Mac.

Like most Mac users, I tend to leave my Mac running for weeks on end before a re-boot, and thus I often leaves apps open.

It does seem like when this has happened I have had Nikon View open.

Do I have a hardware issue, or is some app just being greedy for my memory?

Btw, it looks like I have 16GB of RAM.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

.

 

[Ruggy]

You said yourself, you don't reboot the machine very often, so the first thing I would do is try rebooting it and see if that fixes the problem.
Ram gets allocated and the quickest way to free it up is to reboot.
I would think rebooting weekly will fix the problem.
Just go to the apple icon and hit restart when you've finished once in a while. You'll hardly notice it.

 

[Fishrrman]

Fishrrman's "this will solve your problems" solution:
SHUT DOWN the MBP each night, and reboot each morning.
A "fresh start" works for the computer, too.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

Who knows? When it happens, open up Activity Monitor and look at what's taking up the most memory.

You're going to be the one who identifies the problem, not anyone here. We don't have access to your system when it happens.

Best of luck.

Yeah, but since it just started happening, I was wondering if it might be symptomatic of something like bad RAM...

 

[DeltaMac]

Yeah, but since it just started happening, I was wondering if it might be symptomatic of something like bad RAM...

If you have bad RAM, then a restart won't help much, if at all.

But, you can always restart and run a diagnostic test of your MBPro. See what is reported, come back here with the reference code, if it is not clear to you.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

If you have bad RAM, then a restart won't help much, if at all.

But, you can always restart and run a diagnostic test of your MBPro. See what is reported, come back here with the reference code, if it is not clear to you.

I have FDE and a firmware password. Will this work?

 

[DeltaMac]

The diagnostics boots through your internet connection, similar to internet recovery.
Your 2015 MBP is too old to have a T2 chip, so not many issues for booting to a different drive.
But, you will find out when you try it. Just enter your firmware password, if asked, and should work.
AFAIK, having an FDE setup shouldn't have any affect on the diagnostics test, which is essentially testing your hardware. It would include a basic test of the storage hardware (the internal SSD), as it is also hardware. Diagnostics doesn't look at your files, nor the directory/file structure, just a basic test of the storage device itself.

 

[Ruggy]

If you have bad ram then you probably wouldn't be able to start the machine.
If it's a few sectors then go to the apple>about this mac and then find memory.
If you are supposed to have 2x8gb for instance, then thats what is should say and if it says anything else then you have some bad sectors.
But why do people always seem to want complicated solutions, look for serious problems and ignore simple ones?
Apps will grab as much memory as they can, ram gets fragmented. Just try shutting the thing down more often, it's almost certainly the solution.

 

[AppleSmack]

I have a 2015 (?) Retina MBP with macOS Sierra, and starting about a week ago, I have started getting a pop-up with this message.

My system hasn't crashed yet, but one time I was on the phone using VoIP nd that made me freak out fearing I'd lose the call.

Recently I installed Nikon ViewNX-i and Adobe Lightroom on my Mac.

Like most Mac users, I tend to leave my Mac running for weeks on end before a re-boot, and thus I often leaves apps open.

It does seem like when this has happened I have had Nikon View open.

Do I have a hardware issue, or is some app just being greedy for my memory?

Btw, it looks like I have 16GB of RAM.

One of your apps has a memory leak.

Until they fix that, restart your Mac more frequently.

With heavy design use, my Mac starts to misbehave after a few weeks. A restart fixes it.