HD free memory disappearance

T

taniaem

Registered
hi, i've been having a problem with my free HD memory. recently i noticed the amount of free memory is decreasing faster than before. for example, when i turned the computer on it said 15.4Mb, then after a few days, it said 14.6, without any major files being saved to justify it. then i turn if off and on again, and the free memory goes back up to about 15.4. or not, there are times it goes up again but not to the previous value. no idea what could be wrong. the problem seems to be associated with a text editing program BBEdit, it takes forever when opening and closing and sometimes i notice that when it closes, some of the free memory is gone as well. no idea if that's really related...
sorry for the long text, but i couldn't explain it in fewer words. tania
 
i have 256 or RAM memory. know it's not that much, but i only started noticing this recently, and i'm not using any programs different from before. but anyway, if that's the case, then is it normal that the free HD memory will decrease that much (example, 500Mb since yesterday, without saving anything as big)? (sorry if this sounds stupid to ask...) thanks for helping!
 
It's common if you use the computer a lot, or have a lot of open programs, yes.

One question: when you say "15.4 Mb", do you really mean 15.4 Gb? If not, 15.4Mb is not nearly enough space on your hard drive... you need to keep at least 10% - 15% of your hard drive free at all times.
 
That's normal. Mac OS X will make use of the free space for virtual memory. I sometimes live dangerously low on free disk space (I've _got_ to do something about this sometime...) and notice this a lot. Sometimes, when I have about 2 GB left free and do a restart, I've suddenly got about 5 or 6 GB free, so all that space actually _was_ either used for virtual memory or other caching by the applications themselves...
 
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