# Not enough memory

> Why Vato refuses to start a turn or a service when your machine runs out of memory, and how to free room.

Vato checks how much memory your machine has left before it starts anything heavy. When there isn't enough, it refuses the launch and tells you, instead of letting Windows kill the whole application while your conversations are still streaming.

## What you see

The refusal appears where you asked for the work:

- **Starting a turn** — the conversation shows an error saying there is not enough memory to start a new turn.
- **An agent starting a project service** (`server_start`, for example a dev server or a watcher) — the tool result says there is not enough memory to start a persistent service.

Both messages give the exact figures: how much commit and free RAM is available, and how much is required. Like other runtime errors, they are worded in French.

## Why a turn counts as heavy

One turn is not just a model call. Vato starts the provider's command-line tool, a bridge process, a plugin host, and often a browser for that conversation. Several conversations running at once, plus dev servers and native builds started by agents, add up quickly — a single Next.js dev server or a Rust link step can take several gigabytes on its own.

## How to free room

In rough order of how much they give back:

1. **Stop a project service.** Ask an agent to run `server_stop`, or open the terminal panel and close the service there. A dev server left running from an earlier session is the most common cause.
2. **Stop a turn you no longer need.** Use **Stop** in the conversation. Its provider process, plugin host and browser are released with it.
3. **Close conversations you aren't watching.** A conversation with a live browser panel keeps that browser running.
4. **Close heavy applications outside Vato** — other IDEs, containers, browsers with many tabs.

Then send your message again. Nothing is lost by the refusal: your prompt stays in the composer and the conversation is untouched.

## The threshold

Vato requires free commit space and free physical RAM before a heavy launch. On a large machine that is 6 GB of commit and 1 GB of RAM; on a smaller one the requirement scales down (an eighth of the commit limit, a sixteenth of total RAM) so a modest laptop can still work.

If the memory probe cannot read a usable measurement, Vato does **not** block — it would rather let the launch through than refuse on bad data. The probe is currently Windows-only, so this guard does not apply on macOS or Linux.

## If Vato closed on its own

A refusal means the guard worked. If instead Vato disappeared without warning, the next start records that the previous session never exited cleanly, and conversations that were running are marked **Interrupted** with a **Retry** action — they are resumable, and nothing written before the crash is lost.

Source: https://vatoide.com/docs/troubleshooting/not-enough-memory