memory leaks

patto_chan

My 2 year old MBP (2.33 GHz, 2GB RAM, OS X 10.4.11) has about 1 gig free on the boot partition. The HD is 120GB in total but I've made the boot partition 30GB and use the other partitions to store photos, music, video etc.

After running several apps (usually MS Excel/Word 2004, Firefox, iTunes) I notice the available space on the boot OS X partition decreases to the point where I get warnings to shut applications. When I shut down the apps, the disk space does not recover and I need to reboot to give myself some working room.
I tend to run my MBP for days at a time and just put it to sleep at night. I also run multiple tabs in Firefox. This may exacerbate matters.

Any suggestions?

I am aware my MBP is clogged and over the Christmas break I think I will use the free time to rethink my partitioning arrangement, increase the size of the OS X partition and do a total reinstall.

Sad Professor

I think 2 things are happening here.

First, your mac is using a lot of virtual memory. Virtual memory creates a "swap file" on your hd which increases in size with your virtual memory usage. Virtual memory is a normal part of how OSX functions and your mac will always use it even when there's free RAM. But what's probably happening here is that is you are leaving several big apps running and your mac is running out of RAM, resulting in a very large swap file which is stealing all your hd space. I often leave my Mac running for days after which it's not unusual to see a 1GB+ swap file.

Second, I suspect those MS Office apps while left running are creating some very large temporary files which are also stealing space. And then there's Firefox + add-ons which is pretty bloated and bound to be using a lot of RAM.

Basically your boot partition is too small. You need to have more than 1GB free on your hd for virtual memory and temporary file usage to work smoothly. Personally I don't think it's necessary to have a separate partition for everything. Maybe for video if you were doing video work but leave all your music and photo files together. OSX doesn't suffer from the same de-fragmentation issues as Windows.

pvik00

You can use this to reveal what's taking up space and decide on the actions need to be done:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/44018&vid=10945323&mode=info

Use the (older) version of 10.3.9x as it's free, the new 4.x series are shareware. Don't be mislead by version numbers, 10.x is older.

patto_chan

Thanks for the feedback.
True, my boot partition is too small - or has become too clogged. 2 years ago I thought 30GB would be grand.
I have some rearranging to do over the Christmas break.
I'm still curious as to why OS X won't release the hard disk space it has grabbed for swap memory after I have quit all my applications and I need a reboot to get back to '1 gig free'.

Sad Professor

patto_chan wrote: »

I'm still curious as to why OS X won't release the hard disk space it has grabbed for swap memory after I have quit all my applications and I need a reboot to get back to '1 gig free'.

I think, like with RAM, it holds on to it for a while after in case you return to that app. It's a way of making things faster. OSX's memory management is quite complicated but it works well.

Anyway I would recommend getting rid of all the partitions, they aren't really necessary.

babypink

Sad Professor wrote: »

Anyway I would recommend getting rid of all the partitions, they aren't really necessary.

+1 ......just have one great big partition and don't worry about it. The OS will look after the memory management....the last thing you want to do is to undermine it by limiting the amount of swap space it has to play with.