Disk Space memory leaks

H

Harvey

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Hey guys. I put this hear cause I don't see a section for rants, and I don't expect there to be a solution for this.

Now I have 50 MB free on my iBook. After I reboot I'll have 280MB or something.

THIS IS LAME.

I'm not the only one right?? What is this? Can this be fixed?
 
Some people here would say that a relatively small 'free' memory value is a good thing, showing the OS is doing an efficient job by utilizing as much memory as possible. Free memory is just an amount that has not been put to active use by the OS. A small amount of free memory probably just means that your system has had a large number of apps opened. You will probably also notice that there is a larger amount of 'inactive' memory when the 'free' memory is low. The OS will find the memory from inactive or free memory as it is needed.
The 'fix', if you find it necessary to see a high 'free' memory number, is to reboot, but the system doesn't require that, it's quite good at managing memory, so free memory could be shown as quite low, and the system is operating normally.
 
Just to add to that, having stuff in inactive memory is a good thing. Recently opened apps and documents still remain in inactive memory so if you were to start them again, load times for those documents and applications will be a lot less. That is a good thing.

As Deltamac has pointed out, OS X will free up inactive memory if required. So it's a win win scenario. You've effectively got a disk caching utility for free with OS X, and you don't have to bother with the settings since the OS takes care of it.

Btw this is true for most versions of UNIX, where you will see very little 'free' memory when you query the system. In reality the 'free' memory is used to store recently used items to speed up the load times the next time those items are required.
 
Actually I'm talking abotu hard drive space. Not Memory, as in RAM.

Am I the only one?

It gets to the point where now it says my HD has 1MB free. When I closed Photoshop it told me it couldn't save prefs because the disk is full.

When I reboot it will be back up to 100 or so MB free again. Am I the only one? Should I move this to System and Software?
 
I started this discussion as a Rant in the Cafe because I thought it was something I had read about before. Seems like it's not a common issue though so reposting here.

After I rebooted my PC I had 194.3 MB. Before I rebooted I had 1MB free.

I got the information by doing Info on the HD icon on the desktop.

It's legit because for example, before I rebooted when I tried to close an App I was working on... and this is a TextEdit doc I'm talking about here.. and it told me it couldn't save because the comptuer is out of diskspace.

Isn't that crazy?

I am running 10.3.5, 800MHz G3. 640MB SDRAM.

Hrm... What other info would be relevant...

I have the Disk Encryption enabled. The memory leak seems to only happen whlie my PC is sleeping. Not sure on that, but it seems like it.

Let me know if anyone has seen anything like this before. One of the things I like most about my iBook is how fast it wakes up from sleep... IL never shut the thing down. Having to reboot in order to use it is annooyyyiiiinnnnng :D
 
Free HD space. I mean: Do _not_ try to live with just a few hundred megabytes free on Mac OS X. Delete some stuff until you've got at _LEAST_ 2 or 3 GB of free space. And keep it that way. OmniDiskSweeper will help you with the job to find the files you don't need and waste space.

Mac OS X is actively managing virtual memory (RAM on HD) and will sometimes use more, sometimes less, but if the system hasn't got any space for managing virtual memory, it becomes more and more unstable or at least very, very slow. So... Get rid of some files and make some space. And don't call a Mac a PC. It's like calling people idiots.
 
That's far too little disk space, since OS X needs to handle the swap file and the said swap file can grow to be a few GB in size.
 
Aha! Your hard drive is simply way too full. Your OS X needs free space available on the the hard drive to work 'freely'.
The amount necessary is subject to a lot of discussion. I think most would agree that a minimum of 2-3 GB! of free space is good. On a small hard drive, say less than 10 GB, maybe 10-25% is OK. Less than 10% free should mean serious cleaning of unneeded docs, removing never-used apps, etc.
280 MB free after a reboot is way too low. Adding memory so you have more than 512MB RAM can help prevent multiple swap files from forming and CAN help, but freeing space on your boot drive will still be critical. Replacing with larger boot drive, or adding another internal drive, or external storage are other options.
 
fryke said:
And don't call a Mac a PC. It's like calling people idiots.
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"PC" stands for Personal Computer. Last I checked Macs were personal computers too. Yeah well, you prolly could get away with calling it a supercomputer.

This is still a Unix machine. Some Unix systems are setup to flush the /tmp folder upon rebooting. You don't see the /tmp folder because Finder hides it from you, along with the other typical Unix directories. The page file is the file on the hard disk that acts as virtual memory, sure it can shrink and grow, but typically it's best to keep it at a consistent size, for the sake of performance. The OS knows this, so I really doubt that it's on-the-fly changing the page file size, even after a reboot. A better explanation is what I'm presenting: the cleaning of /tmp, or /var/tmp if that's the case.
 
Lycander said:
The page file is the file on the hard disk that acts as virtual memory, sure it can shrink and grow, but typically it's best to keep it at a consistent size, for the sake of performance. The OS knows this, so I really doubt that it's on-the-fly changing the page file size, even after a reboot.
Click to expand...

The OS doesn't change the file size per se, but the vm page files can grow to occupy lots of disk space. What happens is, the OS makes new page files as it needs them. It makes a 64M file, then another 64M file, them a 128M file, then a 256M file, then a 512M file (this is the most I've ever seen it make, because I only have about a gig free on /). The page files live in /var/vm.

Apparently the OS is not very good at unlinking the files when the space isn't needed anymore. I guess it would need to monitor for conditions like, say: there is 256M worth of empty space in the page files and the largest file is 256M. Then it could move all the pages from the largest pagefile into the three smaller ones, and drop the largest file.

I've seen this - if I run an app with memory leaks (games tend to be bad for sloppy memory handling, but there's memory leaks in just about everything), for long enough, the page files will grow until there's no room to make a bigger one, and then programs can start getting crashy when they try to allocate more memory. If you quit the app that's eating all the memory, then programs work fine, but the disk space stays full until a reboot.
 
Wow, I didn't know that it was normal to keep so much disk space free. Thanks for the tip. I'll think about freeing up some space ;-)

It's hard with my digital camera and all that msuic though... I have a 10 gig iPod, that takes up half my 20gig drive already just syncing music... Hrm.....

Anyway, glad my problem makes sense and isn't just some freakin system trouble.

And don't call a Mac a PC. It's like calling people idiots.
Click to expand...

Hehe.
 
I had a 6 GB in my G3... upgraded to 40 GB !

20 GB will be very small if you want to keep 10 GB of music in your Mac. Did you consider using an external disk ?
 
Did you consider using an external disk ?
Click to expand...

I never got around to buying one... now is the time. ANyone have any tips on which brands are good? One of my key factors would be durability as I move around a lot.
 
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