Hi, I keep getting the error “You are running low on available memory! Please close other applications or web browser tabs and retry. Or save and restart Shotcut.” But I have plenty of ram left and other than that shotcut is working normally. Is there a flag or some other way to disable this? It keeps popping up while I’m trying to record my screen.
There is no way to disable it. What is your operating system? Show us how you know there is plenty of RAM left, possibly with a screen shot that shows whatever you are looking at shortly after the dialog appears. Please be aware that the dialog does not close itself when more memory becomes available. That means it could have appeared some time ago when memory was low, but now it is fine and you just noticed the dialog.
If you are not using Shotcut while recording the screen I suggest you close it.
@shotcut Thanks for the reply. I’m using Ubuntu. I think I have plenty of RAM left because when the popup appears my system is not slow at all and if I immediately call top from the command line the %MEM is in the low 20’s, it’s possible a spike in memory use triggered the dialog but it can’t have lasted more than a few seconds. Unfortunately I have to record the screen and edit the recording together because what I record next depends on the timing I can arrange with shotcut.
ps: I found a workaround, I launch shotcut through the command line and whenever I want to record the screen I place it in background with Ctrl + Z which freezes it. It stops the popup when I’m recording but it still appears sometimes while I’m using shotcut.
pps: I’ve been using shotcut for a few months and this behaviour is new, as I say, other than the popup it works well, it is not slow, I don’t understand why it’s complaining about low RAM if it doesn’t seem to need more.
On Linux, it reads “MemAvailable” from /proc/meminfo, which does not include virtual memory.
“%MEM” in top is a column showing the percentage of memory usage for each process. So, you saw some process’ percentage of memory usage and not available memory. I believe the status “avail Mem” in the bottom right of the header area corresponds to MemAvailable in meminfo. To Shotcut, on Linux and Windows “low” means < 256 MB available. A video project can very quickly and easily need more memory than it currently is using. You probably are low. Not currently being slow is not an indicator.
You are right, I’m used to looking at %CPU, by which top sorts processes so the process with most appears at the top, it’s possible that shotcut had a lot on %MEM and wasn’t at the top. But I just tested using shotcut for a while while keeping an eye on top and memory for the shotcut process never went above 27.9% even when the popup appears. And it wouldn’t jump to ~%100 and back quickly would it? That agrees with what I’ve been telling you that usage is normal, not slow. And even if it is using a lot of memory and the popup is correct, I feel like letting the system slow down a little and use the swap when necessary would be a better user experience than constantly telling me thorough a popup. I hope you don’t take this criticism the wrong way, I actually am loving shotcut, it’s exactly the tool I needed.
It does not matter what Shotcut or any one other process is doing. What matters is what remains from the whole system outside of all the currently running processes. The user experience of a video editing application when the system needs to start paging virtual memory to the hard drive is very bad and worse than this dialog. I have had my Linux systems become completely unusable for over an hour after running out of physical memory from a memory-hogging situation. The user experience of crashes and export failures is worse than this dialog. Years of providing support for people having problems from running out of memory and not realizing it has led to this. If you do not like the dialog then do what it says or get more memory.
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