Has your file ever said "file out of memory"?

I’ve been working on a file recently and when attempting to open it I got a message saying the following:

“File out of memory, it’s no longer safe for you to continue to edit as figma may not properly function”

It does not allow you to move forward from that point. You can load from a previous version of the file but even doing that gives the same message. Any insight on what the issue could be or should I suck it up and start over from scratch?

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Try to break the file down into multiple files: copy/paste objects from it into new files.

Is there a way to see what parts of a file area eating up the memory? It might be a little bit on the Advanced User side, but it would go a looooong way to diagnosing what the issue is.

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Large/many images and components with many layers are the main reasons of that, as far as I know.

For anyone else who views this thread, this feature became obscured but you can go to the Figma menu > View > View resource use to see a slightly better visual of what’s happening in your file

image

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The out-of-memory issues have been happening more frequently and on files that are not that large. For example 1 page, 12 Variant components with very few@ nested components. Even the variant combinations are somewhat simple.

And for context, the file I just mentioned that is frequently giving us this memory error is a new file we created to move and isolate some components from a much larger (many pages, many component sticker sheet file). It confuses me that the newer scaled-down file is the one with memory issues when the bigger file doesn’t have that problem.

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Do you by any chance have in the small file instances of large variant sets from the large file, which have more than 100 variants for example?

I can also confirm that this is happening to me lots too. Its extremely frustrating as its stopping me from doing my work and and is making me think of switching to a product that doesn’t have these issues. The file was working fine, then i restarted my machine and figma says it can no longer load the file as it would be unstable to do so. When trying to load previous versions, none of them work. I also get no warning that the file is getting to large, something i’m told is supposed to happen in the UI. I’ve had nothing, which makes it even more infuriating! Yes I have a lot of screens, but they don’t have many layers and the images have been downscaled to screen resolution as to not take up lots of memory. Figma needs to get on top of this as a matter of urgency as its road blocking us from working.

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Just another update to this. my file is now completely unload-able. I went through all 50 saved versions and none of them load. These versions stem from April 2nd to March 13th and literally none of them work. i was never warned during any of these ‘saves’ that there was a memory issue. So all of my work is now lost. This is really really really bad.

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It’s happening to me too, so frustrating.
Please solve this bug.

No, our variants are purposely kept to reasonable sizes. As part of our revamp of our component libraries we are doing a lot of consolidation and removal of unnecessary overworked components. We are also separating many components into individual files (for example, forms is 1 file, buttons is 1 file, etc.). We are doing this to make it easier to publish new and updated components without having to monitor a single giant sticker sheet. As a result the files should be much smaller and have less memory issues. What we are experiencing though is that these new smaller files are often the ones that give us the memory error.

I have also been monitoring the memory and we are not even close to anything that should cause these errors. I really believe this a Figma bug.

Thanks for the details. I’m asking about variants quantity because technically when you import one component from the component set, the whole set is still stored in the file as a reference. I don’t know if it works this way exactly, but at least that’s how the plugins API behaves, so I would imagine it’s not far from the truth. So let’s imagine you have three variant sets of 100 components in three different files. Now you use three instances of these sets in one file: boom, you have 300 variants imported in a single file. I don’t know how much these “ghost components” contribute to the memory being used, but it’s definitely not 0. And all nested components are stored this way as well. However, I don’t think this alone is enough for the file to be out of memory. Other people have quite large libraries and their files work fine.

Having the same issue, a rather small file, we had to split it several times. There are bugs hidden under the variants and trash is getting stored somewhere, but this is killing my project and obviously complicating things with clients.

Screen Shot 2022-05-16 at 4.17.38 PM
How can it be that I update 1 text in a component library and when I update the file, layer count rises by thousands?

If You Even Can’t able to Restore the previous versions of All the saved version Then Follow the steps as per i tell
if The screen keeps on showing file out of Memory then

Step : 1
you just open in your mobile and Login the creditial as same you are using in your System, you can only able to view the file Not to Edit,

Step 2:
so you come to your system and go to home page of figma and go to the Project where you were working, and right click on the project and click on Share Option ,

step:3
you create new Account in figma and add that Email id in Share option as to only View to to Edit if You add View Then still You will get Same Error.

step:4
You will get notification to that added Email ID and, click on open Figma / file from gmail, You will Redirect to the Design Files

step: 5
Once you can view the design then You Just try to Select All Frames and Copy Ctrl + C and Paste In new Page You will Get Back your Design with Edit Option and you can still work On with The Same design pages

Just Follow These Steps Definetely You can Backup all the Desing Files Back to Work

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According to the resource use, it looks like the max is 2 GB of Memory. I run out of memory all the time. Breaking a file down into separate files isn’t a good option since it’s for the same app concept and we’d have to jump back and forth, make sure that the components are in sync etc.

Is there a way to increase max memory Figma can allocate?

I tried using Figma in both the browser and desktop app (macOS), but it’s the same issue (since the desktop app is also using the same web framework)

4 Likes

Hey, guys. In my case I solved it by duplicating the file and opening the copy. So I was deleting the pages that were not necessary.

THIS WORKED!!! Thank you! You saved my day!