Macbook pro suddenly slow and fluctuating free space?

[mixerguy]

Hey mac genius'.

Hope this isn't a stupid question...

In the last 24 hours, my macbook pro has suddenly started to run incredibly slow. I haven't downloaded anything huge in the recent past, and the change seems very sudden.

I have 120 gigs of space, and right now I have about 10 free gigs. (2 gigs in ram).

The other crazy thing is that when I open a Finder window, I can actually see my amount of free space fluctuate fairly drastically. It generally moves up or down by about 500 mbs.

I've actually witnessed it fluctuate from 11 gigs (of free space) to about 6 gigs within 5 minutes. And then back up again. ?

So far I've:

-Deleted a bunch of unneeded files and programs.
-run an antivirus software
-ran disk utility

Except...running the "repair disk permissions" thing takes FOREVER...I mean like 2-3 hours....I've had to cancel it every single time.

Any ideas? Help? Hints?

Thanks!

-m

 

[Giaguara]

That fluctuation is because of the caches. The applications you run use the hard drive for storing some data they also use. If you opened PhotoShop or similar applications that work with large files, you could easily see free space fluctuation of several GBs.

One of the reasons your Mac is getting slow is because it has less than 15 % of the hard drive space free. On a 120 GB hard drive, you want to keep at least 18 GB of the disk free so that the system can easier maintain itself clean. If the disk gets too full, it's like cleaning in a room that is too full. Instead of being able to move the large chunks of data or furniture to clean behind them, doing tetris to clean one's living room is going to, at least, take much longer to get the room clean than if there was enough space to simply vacuum or wipe.

There are a few things you can do instantly to get more space. Empty the trash - the items in the trash still take HD space until the trash is emptied.
Clean the drive - there are probably files you don't need to have always with you. Get some of those files to an external drive to get space.
When you restart a Mac, some space appears to get free - that is simply as the caches are freed from some of the apps that were using the space before the restart.

You can also use OnyX to clean the Mac's system. Make sure to get the version that is listed for your Mac OS X (10.6 for 10.6, 10.5 for 10.5 etc). OnyX is free to use, and it's one of the best system maintenance tools available.
In OnyX, one of the things you want to run is periodic cleaning. Daily, monthly, weekly. You could run those also in Terminal, but OnyX also helps in other maintenance and cleaning tasks.