When "Preferences > Page Display > (Rendering) Use Page Cache" is enabled (which is the default) then on some files memory can grow very quickly to many gigabytes causing the MacOS 14.4.1 (Sonoma) to want to Force Quit apps.

Interestingly, if one changes focus to switch to another app or the Finder, then the high memory usage disappears, but switching back to Acrobat will have it grow again.

The memory grows when scrolling to view other pages. One of the worst PDF file examples I found for this is the following file online (from Safari I used the option near the bottom of the window to load the PDF into Acrobat):

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f3c70ae90e3eba92/33bb5a0c-full.pdf

Turning off Use Page Cache and quitting/launching Acrobat fixes the problem, but there is absolutely no reason for this bug. It appears that this problem occurs the most for PDF files where the pages are scans (i.e. a PDF file with a full size high res 300 dpi image on every page 2550 x 3300 pixels).

What makes no sense is how even the entire file with raw file size of 128.5 MB and where even storing uncompressed 300 dpi images for all 155 images would only be 1.2 GB yet it can grow to at least 12 or 20 GB in memory usage! What is strange is that it isn't always this bad but the problem doesn't happen when Use Page Cache is off so this problem seems related to something going very wrong when the cache gets larger.

This apparently is a known problem at Adobe since there are multiple posts over the years from Amal since at least 2020 so why isn't this problem fixed? At least there is the workaround of turning off Use Page Cache, but this option defaults to on so everyone will experience this once they start looking at PDF files with scanned pages.