Hello. New to forum. Recently upgraded to Ventura and Sketchup 2023 for Mac. I was hoping it would resolve my memory issues and it has to some extent but not if I want to open other applications. I keep running out of memory. My sketchup file is huge at 800 MB but it is taking almost 28 GB of my 64 GB memory. If I happen to leave the file open overnight it gobbles up to 47GB of memory and my system runs out of memory. Is it normal for sketchup pro to take up this quantity of memory for a large file?
800MB is enormous for a SketchUp file. Is much of the space consumed by large images and/or textures, or by geometry (edges and faces)? I would be curious to know what are the total edge and face count statistics reported by the Model Info window. Either way, such a large SKP file will consume a lot of memory at run-time in the SketchUp application.
With that said, memory consumption should not increase spontaneously, which is how I interpret your description of the result from leaving SketchUp running (but idle as far as you know) overnight.
I am aware it is huge with lots of image textures. I used to have it on my MacBookpro 2014 32GB with some issues which is why I upgraded the new Mac. I am not really asking for a fix to reduce the file. I can take the time to go through all the fixes to reduce it and or split it up. I thought I had bought enough memory. I was planning to go talk to the apple guys about it but before they bounce me back and say it’s a sketchup issue I wanted to see if 28GB was reasonable for a 800 MB file…and alot of edges.
Woah.
14million edges is a crazy amount.
I think that’s the long and short of it.
As you are using 2023 , 800mb is a compressed file, so the file itself is going to be well over 1GB.
I’d imagine at this point your CPU and GPU are running into issues too as with such a complex file those will be working overdrive.
There has to be some optimisation there that can be done to de-bloat that and reduce the memory useage.
I do like a challenge - if you can share it, I’ll happily take a look.
1 Like
I’ll add that many (most?) softwares are like goldfishes. Give them a bigger bowl, they’ll grow up.
Some softwares, thinking of Photoshop right now, allow the user to cap the RAM use. SU don’t.
So in your case, you have a huge file, very very heavy, on a machine with a lot of RAM. not really surprised it’s taking its space.
How long have you been working when taking this screenshot ? 28Gb immediately at start would be a bit much, but after a few hours, yeah, sure. It’s just 45% of your available RAM after all.
I didn’t suggest it. 
You confirmed the presence of large images and very high numbers of edges and faces, both of which naturally contribute to memory usage. I can’t say whether 28GB is an appropriate amount of memory for such a model, sorry. For reference, I sometimes work with SKP models that are about 280MB in size in the pre-zipped SKP era (2018), which have ~10 million of edges and faces but no images. On my Mac such a model consumes perhaps 3GB of memory, from what I recall.
What caught my eye when reading your original post was the implication that memory usage is increasing spontaneously while SketchUp is apparently idle - your overnight comment. If memory is really increasing overnight, that indicates a problem to me. SketchUp will gradually consume increasing amounts of memory during a long active editing session, but it shouldn’t consume increasing memory while idle. Maybe an extension is doing something in the background? Does the SketchUp process consume any significant amount of CPU time when the GUI is idle (in other words, when you are not doing anything interactive with SketchUp) and SketchUp is not rendering an animation or etc.? I would expect nearly zero CPU usage when SketchUp is idle.
One known culprit with a memory leak was an older version of the Mac driver for 3D Connexion devices.
Ok Thanks.That gives me a better idea of size of file vs memory usage. I have an appointment with some “geniuses” to discuss the memory gobbling issue while idle. Unfortunately Enscape my rendering software only works with sketchup 2022 and when I upgraded to Ventura I can no longer use it. I figured that the memory usage would go down significantly with no Enscape, but it is still really high. Thanks again for the comments from everyone…but as I said, I am not looking to fix the file.
Again, how long would you say it took SU to eat 28 Gb?
Because if it’s 10 min, then it’s a lot, and quick.
If you’re telling me you’ve been working on it 4-5h, then you might consider quit / reopen when having a break / leaving for the day. That way at least you’ll protect yourself from memory leaks.
But again, looking at it in term of percentage, 44% of the RAM isn’t that scary.
I have observed that once SketchUp allocates memory, it never gives it back to the system. For example, if I open a large model, close that one and open a small model, the memory stays at the high-water mark from the large model until I restart SU. As a result, it is normal for the memory to usage to grow during use, but at some point it ought to stabilize.
As @Anssi pointed out, the 3DConnexion drivers on Mac used to have a severe memory leak, but that was fixed several versions ago and no longer happens. So unless the OP has one of their devices and hasn’t updated the drivers in a few years, that is not a likely cause.