Major Memory leak - Acquisition

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I just left my computer on over night downloading stuff with acquisition. When i woke up the hard drive was thrashing like hell.

It took about 45 seconds to show me the desktop (from screen saver) and there was a system message saying i had run out of hard disk space and i had best close windows and start quitting applications or system performace will suffer.

The message didn't say exactly that but it was along those lines.

Luckly i still had top running in the background and i could see that Acquisitions VSIZE was 2.92GB... Rather large i thought.

I checked in /var/vm and there were 39 swwap files and my hard drive had 20Mb space left - Normally 3Gb.

I managed to force quit acquisition (after 15 seconds or so of waiting for the force quit dialog) then ran periodic daily to remove some of the swap files. There are still 14 swapfiles now but system performace is normal now. I am going to do a restart anyway.

This post is half rant half warning to other acquisition users about this problem.

Anyone else experienced this?

[edX]

your description sounds more like you just ran out of HD space. you need to have about 15% of your drive free in order to avoid things like this. putting your swap files on another drive will help to some degree. or putting your download folder on another drive.

this will occur anytime you try to squeeze space on your drive and isn't necessarily related to any program except that obviously a program that does nothing but fill your drive while unattended is more likely to do this.

[gatorparrots]

A lot of file sharing applications are known to have major memory leaks. Run them at your own risk (and with plenty of available free space for swapfiles).

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I was downloading a 10Mb file.

I normally have 3Gb Free on my 10Gb Drive

and 39 swap files (thats over 2.8Gb of swap files) is not normal for me especially with 384 Mb RAM. I cant even get that many when i load almost all of the apps on my computer at the same time!!

All i had running was finder, terminal-top and aquisition! Have you ever seen an app having 2.92Gb of Virtual memory assigned to it? (VSIZE in top)

[edX]

well, yea, for a 10 mb file you've got a point. you made it sound like alot more in your first post.

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warning dialog:

[Anim8r]

I get kernel panics all the time if I leave acquisition running for too long.

[gatorparrots]

Aquisition is not-yet-1.0 software. It has its share of bugs, one of which is an obvious memory leak. Try an alternative file sharing application.