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I have a Macbook 14" ( M1 Pro ) with 16GB of RAM.

However, the Force Quit Applications window pops up when I surpass the ~10GB of RAM utilization.

Even if I close some applications, this window keeps popping up after a short while. The system becomes unusable until I restart it. This mostly happens after 16-20h of uptime.

Attached is the picture of htop output and the popup. I did not close any applications; I just waited for the popup to appear.

Picture of the top output and the Force Quit Application popup

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I figured out that what was full was the virtual memory address space. The Grammarly application was occupying 13GB on average in the span of 16h of uptime.

I followed the advice from this post and found the responsible for it. Both methods worked and confirmed Grammarly app was the culprit:

  • Method A. Look at Applications -> Utilties -> Activity Monitor -> View (menu) -> All Processes -> Memory (tab), you can see what processes are using lots of memory.

  • Method B. Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal: ps ax -o vsz,pid,comm | sort -n, which will display the virtual memory used sorted, so the largest virtual memory-consuming users are at the end. The virtual memory sizes are in 1024-byte units.

Both methods come from BobHarris answer to the apple discussions.

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