macOS 26 Tahoe “System Has Run Out of Application Memory” After Sleep — Here’s Why and How to Fix It

After upgrading to macOS 26 Tahoe, many Mac users have started seeing a worrying message after waking their device from sleep. The message says:

"Your system has run out of application memory."

Once this message appears, the Mac often becomes unresponsive. Apps pause one by one, Activity Monitor won’t open, and the only option left is to force-quit apps or power off the Mac. What makes the problem more confusing is that it affects Macs with all kinds of hardware — including models with 32GB, 48GB, or even 64GB of RAM.

The pattern is clear: it typically occurs after sleep, and it only began after upgrading to macOS 26 Tahoe.

In this article, I explain what you can do to fix this issue.

Before you start troubleshooting, please ensure that your Mac is running the latest version of macOS Tahoe.

1. Boot your Mac in Safe Mode (Apple Silicon Macs)

The first fix you should try when you encounter "Your system has run out of application memory" message on your Mac is to boot your device in safe mode. Safe Mode disables third-party extensions and cleans caches:

• Shut down your Mac
• Hold Power > choose "Options"
• Choose your startup disk, usually Macintosh HD
• Hold Shift while clicking Continue in Safe Mode
• If the issue disappears, the cause is likely an extension, daemon, browser helper, or background process.

2. Restart without reopening windows

Some users have dozens of apps automatically reopening when macOS starts. On Tahoe, this can instantly trigger memory spikes. When you restart your Mac, uncheck: "Reopen windows when logging back in."

• Go to **Apple Menu **> Restart.
• Unselect the box as you can see below:

3. Check Activity Monitor after a fresh restart

Once you restart cleanly, check Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities) before letting the Mac go to sleep again.
Look for:

• Apps using more than 10–20GB of memory (Safari, Mail, Messages are common triggers)
• contextstored or powerd using large amounts of RAM
• Electron apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code) climbing rapidly
• Safari WebKit processes showing repeated crashes or high memory usage
• Activity Monitor is not helpful after the issue appears, because the Mac becomes unresponsive.
• Checking it right after a clean restart is more insightful.

4. Remove Chrome and Chrome-related background helpers

Many users are surprised to learn that Chrome installs multiple background processes, even if Chrome is not open. These include:

• Chrome Updater
• Chrome Keystone
• Google Chrome Helper
• Google Crash Handler
• Google Software Reporter Tool

These can run continuously, consume resources, and trigger leaks in Apple apps.

If you want to do this:

• Quit Chrome
• Delete Chrome from Applications (this will uninstall Chrome)
• Remove Google background processes (e.g., via /Library/Google and ~/Library/Google)
• Restart the Mac
• You can reinstall Chrome later if needed.

This step is mostly diagnostic — if the issue goes away, you have found the culprit.

5. Rebuild the Spotlight index

Spotlight and Siri-driven data systems changed significantly in macOS Tahoe. A corrupted Spotlight index can:

• cause runaway memory usage
• trigger contextstored spikes
• cause Mail and Messages to use gigabytes of RAM
• slow down sleep/wake processes

Here is how to do this:

• Open System Settings > Spotlight
• Scroll to Search Privacy
• Click and add your entire drive
• Wait a few seconds
• Remove the drive from the list

6. Check your storage — System Data may be exploding

When macOS runs out of space for swap files, the memory system collapses. Signs you are running low on space:

• System Data grows from 20GB to 200GB
• You lose 50–100GB of free space overnight
• The Mac runs slowly after sleep
• You cannot install apps or updates

You can view your Mac storage by going to System Settings > General > Storage Settings.

What to do:

• Delete large downloads
• Clear browser cache
• Empty Mail downloads folders
• Remove unused Xcode simulators
• Clean out old Time Machine snapshots
• Delete apps you don’t use
• This gives macOS room for swap, reducing crashes.

7. Reduce large wallpaper collections

It seems that macOS 26 caches multiple versions of each wallpaper in:

• full resolution
• multiple scaled sizes
• different dynamic variants
• blurred background versions

If you use an album with hundreds of wallpapers, macOS may cache:

• 20GB
• 50GB
• or even over 100GB

This storage bloat means macOS cannot create swap space, which directly triggers the "out of application memory" error.

You may want to use a single wallpaper or a much smaller set of images. You can change this by going to System Settings > Wallpaper.

See also: Is macOS Tahoe Sluggish? Here’s Why and How to Speed it Up