---
title: "Why is my IDE running out memory?"
date: "2025-05-08T07:32:24+00:00"
summary: "Discover why your IDE is running out of memory and learn effective solutions to optimize its performance."
image:
type: "article"
url: "/acquia-cloud-platform/add-ons/cloud-ide/help/68806-why-my-ide-running-out-memory"
id: "171e1e1f-8bf2-4275-bab0-658923536c90"
---

An IDE has certain [resource limits](/acquia-cloud-platform/add-ons/ide/resources#ide-container-resources), especially for memory. If this memory limit is reached, processes are killed and the IDE might restart.

Note

Certain commands, such as `free` and `top`, do not accurately report available memory in a Cloud IDE. Instead, use the following commands to view memory usage and the memory limit:

*   `cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.usage_in_bytes`
*   `cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.limit_in_bytes`

The IDE memory limit cannot be increased. If a program is frequently running out of memory, you must reduce its memory usage by one of the following methods:

*   Check for any known issues related to memory leaks or excessive memory usage.
*   Update the program to the latest version. For example, the latest releases of Composer, NPM, and Yarn use much less memory than earlier releases.
*   Check if the program has an internal memory limit that is less than the IDE limit. For example, PHP processes have their own memory limit.
*   Profile the process by using a debugger to see if memory usage can be reduced. For example, Xdebug can be used to [profile the memory usage](https://xdebug.org/docs/profiler) of PHP scripts.