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Figma Helper (Renderer) is using excessive memory, why?

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
June 7, 2021
107 replies
24590 views

Hello everyone, I’m trying to discern what the underlying issue is here. This has only been really presenting itself as a problem in the past few days, but for some reason almost any Figma project I have open winds up consuming essentially all of my system memory.

I’ve noticed that this happens regardless of how many project files I have open. While I’m not experiencing any crashing of the application, it does bring my work laptop to a grinding halt and creates an essentially unusable experience. Is there any reason Figma is utilizing so much memory? Are our working files just too large?

For reference, I’m using the desktop app on macOS 10.15.7 and as far as I am aware this is the latest version available.

I’m really scratching my head over this one as to why it’s popped up as an issue so suddenly. Granted this Macbook Pro is just a base configuration, so it may just be a performance limitation, but I wouldn’t expect Figma to be stressing the machine out worse than Adobe’s Creative Suite. Any insight is most welcome! Please let me know if you need any specific information.

Thanks Figma Community!

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Best answer by djv

Hey All, sorry for the lack of acknowledgement here!

Historically, the forum has been primarily run by the community, and I didn’t start at Figma until August 30th, 2021.

As a browser-based app, Figma uses available browser memory (~2GB per browser tab) while loading and saving, but it shouldn’t use much CPU.

Where you’re seeing the Agent or Helper using a lot of your available CPU, we suggest clearing the cache on your browser and/or desktop app. And if that doesn’t help, use an app cleaner to fully uninstall all Figma apps and then reinstall from our Downloads page.

Here’s how to clear the desktop app cache on a Mac:

Quit the Figma desktop app
Open Terminal.app and enter the following command:
rm -rf "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Figma/"{Desktop,DesktopProfile}
Try opening the desktop app again

And here’s how to clear the desktop app cache on Windows:

Close the Figma desktop app
Open the Start menu, and paste in this, followed by enter: %APPDATA%\Figma
In the window that opens, delete the Desktop and DesktopProfile folders if they exist
Launch the desktop app again

If this doesn’t help, can you reach out directly to our technical quality team here: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Please use your Figma account email, and let us know if this is affecting the Desktop app, browser or both, and provide a screenshot of your Activity monitor.

If this is affecting the Desktop app, please also save and send over your Desktop App debug info file. On Mac you can find this in the Help menu under Troubleshooting, and on Windows, you can find this under the toggle-arrow at the right of the top toolbar under Help > Troubleshooting.

Lastly, the community moderation team here on the forum does not own Figma_support, so please note that tagging this profile will not notify us.

Show previous replies

Anower_Jahan_Shofol

Same with 16GB RAM. It’s just crashing my memory.

S

sengchangko

Same issue here Figma takes up all my 8GB memory on my 2015 Macbook Air i7 Catalina, most of the time I can’t even drag a box.

To my surprise I open the same file on my 2009 mac mini with the same 8GB RAM Catalina Patcher, it runs smoothly.

Both machines on Figma 10.4.1

Anyone from Figma care to look into this?

Ilya_Semenchenko

Hi all, Figma started to consume a lot of RAM. Before it was fine, yesterday I had 8 files open and my mac started to heat up. In processes for each open file appears Figma Renderer, which consumes a lot of RAM. Figma version is the latest + mac is updated too.

Samuel_Baker

Having this issue as well.

Four docs open, two tiny, two are larger but still only around 0.1 G.

This is running on a 13" 2020 M1 MBP, stock 8GB RAM, no external monitor. I did upgrade my internet connection from 100mb to 1gb recently so a network-related issue makes sense.

Any official response from Figma yet? I only do quite light Figma work on this machine but with only Figma, Slack and Chrome (with a few GSuite tabs open) running (plus Finder and Activiy Monitor) I’m getting system notifications that the machine has run out of memory.

Hubert

Same here. MacBook Pro 2018, i5, 8GB RAM. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be a problem for my colleagues working on the MacBooks Air M1.

Pedro_Vidal

Same problem here, but just when using Vivaldi and Chrome browsers.
Tested on Firefox and Brave, and they’re using about 400~500mb ram. In Vivaldi, the ram usage grows to 8~9gb ram.
Is this related to some kind of hardware aceleration in browser? Or anything else?

Pedro_Vidal

Tested again, and it has no patterns. Using same project on Firefox, sometimes it consumes 6gb ram, sometimes consumes 500mb. Weird.

100mb internet connection, cable.

Apple

I have tried Firefox too, but after a while RAM starts to balloon.

Ralph_A

I went through all the comments on this post and haven’t heard one thing from the Figma team. They need to take notes from the folks over at Webflow in how they respond in their community forums! This issue is a big deal.

AbramAuthor

Yep. You’re right Ralph, it’s been radio silence since I lost my initial engineer connection back in September of last year. I think we should continuously add feedback to this thread and also file support requests as well to log the severity of the issue. I have found that some of the more recent updates have at least made Figma usable, but it still is drawing way too many resources overall.

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