Sublime Forum

**chrisbia** · January 4, 2023, 6:48pm

It’s normally the most RAM intensive application on my machine anyways (consistently over 15 GB), but the RAM explodes if I ever happen to accidentally increase/decrease the font size. So I make sure not to do that. However, in this case I accidentally hit cmd + - when I meant alt + shift + - and held it down as I intended to type multiple em dashes. This caused the ram to EXPLODE. Why is that?

Background

I have about 60 individual windows open, most — I think — with several other open items in the side pane and pretty much all of them are unsaved items (no corresponding file).
Running macOS Ventura 13.0.1 on a 2021 24-inch iMac M1 with 16 GB RAM.

**bschaaf** · January 4, 2023, 11:16pm

Does it happen in safe mode?

**chrisbia** · January 5, 2023, 3:02am

No idea. Only use my computer in normal mode.

**bschaaf** · January 5, 2023, 4:49am

Please follow the link and check if it still happens when running Sublime Text in safe mode.

**juanfal** · January 10, 2023, 4:41pm

After some hours, a pretty good bunch of files opened, the last one 23Mb, 1M lines, mine is less RAM greedy

**chrisbia** · January 10, 2023, 5:22pm

And I can assure you not a single one of my open windows has 1M lines; probably, at the most 500 lines. And many, if not most, are considerably less.

**juanfal** · January 10, 2023, 5:39pm

There must be something there in your system. Trying to restart in Safe Mode (to do it depends on your Mac model, old ones ⌘-S while restarting…), can show you the problem behind it. Most probably not Sublime’s

**jfcherng** · January 10, 2023, 5:43pm

Can’t Mac’s activity monitor (process manager?) expand subprocesses? I doubt that it’s cause by a LSP server. But there isn’t much information in this thread.

**chrisbia** · January 11, 2023, 7:33pm

What do you mean by in my system? In what part of my system? As I don’t do anything out of the ordinary other than have as many windows of Sublime Text open as I previously said. And Activity Monitor is pretty clear about it being Sublime Text that’s the one using that much memory.

And even in Sublime Text my settings are pretty ordinary I think:

{
	"color_scheme": "Packages/User/IDLE.tmTheme",
	"font_face": "Consolas",
	"font_size": 14,
	"gpu_window_buffer": "true",
	"gutter": false,
	"ignored_packages":
	[
		"Vintage"
	],
	"index_files": false,
	"index_workers": 0,
	"line_numbers": true,
	"show_full_path": true,
	"show_git_status": false,
}

**chrisbia** · January 11, 2023, 7:33pm

This is really all I can see expanding Sublime Text in Activity Monitor:

**bschaaf** · January 12, 2023, 12:56am

Please check if it also happens in safe mode.

**juanfal** · January 12, 2023, 6:28am

Everything in your system takes a bunch of Gbytes, that’s not normal, and WindowServer using 16.63GB of memory or Chrome 8, has nothing to do with ST

**frou** · January 12, 2023, 9:47am

You can see the child processes in tree form by selecting View > All processes, Hierarchically in Activity Monitor’s menu. But the memory use of the child processes does not contribute to the number shown for the application anyway.

**chrisbia** · January 13, 2023, 8:35pm

No it does not:

**chrisbia** · January 13, 2023, 8:45pm

Well window server deals with GUI stuff, and this problem only rears its head when I have a large amount of Sublime windows open (~60), so not entirely unrelated. But whatever way you spin it that fact of the matter is that Sublime Text is using that much RAM, and that shouldn’t be the case. Chrome using 6GB is hardly a red flag depending on what you have open, but a text editor using over 10 times that amount certainly is.

**tajmone** · January 15, 2023, 7:17pm

Not really, that’s beyond the resources consumption baseline expected by any app — i.e. regardless of the files open, disk-caching should prevent such high RAM consumption thresholds.

But then, I’m not a macOS user, so I can’t tell what the normal expectation are here, but @juanfal’s comments seem to confirm that these are rather high.

By any chance, is this a virtualized macOS? (i.e. is it running in a virtual machine of any sort?)

Software virtualization might explain the extra RAM consumption.

**chrisbia** · January 16, 2023, 12:54pm

According to where?

I don’t understand. How so?

Not virtualized. It’s a 2021 M1 iMac running macOS Ventura 13.0.1.

**TheSecEng** · January 16, 2023, 8:44pm

@chrisbia you’ve not respond to @bschaaf o. What happens if it happens in Safe Mode for Sublime Text which would really help.

Can someone explain why Sublime Text is using over 70GB of ram?

Background