This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
I keep getting an error message whenever I use onenote that says "your system has run out of application memory". It pops up after a couple minutes and has been going on for about a week now. Prior to this it had never happened. this is extremely frustrating because i need to use onenote for medical school. has anybody else had this issue and how do i fix it? i dont know if it has something to do with the new apple update? Plzzzzz help!!
A family of Microsoft products that enable users to capture, organize, and reuse notes electronically.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
OneNote engineer here
It's hard to give you an exact date because of the staggered way in which we rollout Office Updates, but I can tell you that an improvement had been checked in.. and its a matter of releasing the update that should reach customer before end of year.
To all of you fellow OneNote Mac Annoying Memory Overflow Sufferers (OMAMOS)...
So far, no luck with updates from Microsoft. Nothing works. The memory leak is still insane.
I have been exploring various things and wanted to post here to keep folks from wasting time.
First, following the "remove" instructions from Microsoft (https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/remove-onenote-from-your-mac-a14a5c9c-681c-4c7a-9d6e-3605b0b30e9c#:~:text=From%20the%20Finder%2C%20Click%20the,icon%20isn%27t%20docked.) and reinstalling, it did not fix the problem, but it did generate a set of "misplaced sections" (please see below) that were apparently out of sync between my different computers. Painfully (hours) combing through them, I was able to find the many differences [mostly missing content] and manually merge the two, eventually deleting the "misplaced sections." Still no luck, but a clue.
What this really seems like is that some sections "get too big" (the error message from sync attempts says to move ALL content to new sections - indeed moving only some of it does not help). When I do that, the error message about "section too big" goes away, but the memory leak persists, at this moment, after all of this work, still coming in at 8.9GB of RAM, perhaps spiking higher (not yet tested for long periods of time).
My take-away is that if sections genuinely get "too big" there needs to be a tool to alert you IN THE MOMENT you make a section too big, or proactively warn of impending "too bigness" to prevent what seems to have happened, which is inadvertently adding too much content. This could all be wrong, but we seem to be getting NO useful help from Microsoft so we are on our own for now.
Again, this does not seem to happen on my Windows 11 or Windows 10 machine. It really seems that in my case one of my several computers has gotten out of sync on OneNote and the problem is on that one. The others do not have the memory leak, but OneNote on them cannot "see" the non-sync'd materials which seem to be in "Microsoft purgatory."
Please, please, OneNote Engineers... take a deep dive into this. Many are suffering. What does it take to get a real fix here?
Thanks,
Greg
Gregory Kovacs, MD, PhD
Professor, Stanford University
It is not done yet, but so far OneNote uploaded 14.9 GB of data. It is still hogging 18.2 GB of RAM, but hopefully this is a useful path to go down.
Greg
Thanks!
Look at the upper corner of the OneNote window and click on "Saved offline (error)" if you see that. This may all have to do with sync not working and creating a "backup" on the computer that can't upload.
Greg
Im with Cho on this one! Unable to find that "too big" section.
Agreed .. Greg.. you've done more for us than any person at Microsoft. Lol.