where'd my disc space go

[normcook]

the past few days i have been gettin this message: there is not enough hard drive space on Mac OS X System.... close running programs or else continuing is risky......:

well when i looked at my system drive (os x on its own partition), there were about 240 megs unnaccounted for.... and now today the rest of it was gone until i had zero kb available on it..... normally it has a little over 300 free megs... i have been runnin os x for months and this is a new problem....

where is it going? i ran 'top' and didnt notice anything unusual or anything taking up an enormous amount of space...... i ran a search for large files somehow being created... i looked at recently modified files and there werent many.....i looked at invisible files on the drive, the three largest were swapfile0, swapfile1, and swapfile2... all exactly 76.3MB... but they hadnt been modified in a week or two (?)....

any help would be appreciated... thanks

[robh]

if you don't leave your machine running through the night, it'll miss log rotations. You can catch up by running these commands..

sudo sh /etc/daily
sudo sh /etc/weekly
sudo sh /etc/monthly

Now, chances are that hasn't released a huge amount of diskspace, so try this in a very wide terminal window..

sudo find / -size +10000000c -ls

it'll list all large files (over 10Mb).

If you see something you reckognise as junk you can then remove it. Ask first if you're unsure what a huge file is for :)

[mervTormel]

hmmm, swapfile = 80 MB, 3 swapfiles = 80*3=240 MB

three swapfiles! someone send him $20.00 - he needs more memory!

i suspect VM went to make another swapfile and couldn't. your situation is interesting as it is the first i've heard of the swapper extending itself.

please:

% sudo find / -name "swapfile*"
/private/var/vm/swapfile0

% ll /var/vm/
total 77M
-rw------T 1 root wheel 76M Feb 8 14:20 swapfile0

because this doesn't work !

% sudo find / -name "swapfile*" -ls
304232 0 -rw------T 1 root wheel 0 Feb 8 14:20 /private/var/vm/swapfile0

i'd like to see if swapper created a partial file to alleviate the swapper's panic.

quit as many apps as possible, but i doubt it will stop using and delete swapfileN

[robh]

Originally posted by mervTormel
three swapfiles! someone send him $20.00 - he needs more memory!


I was just reading http://www.macintouch.com/mosxreaderreports82.html and saw this:


From: Bob Dalgleish
Subject: Re: For OS X Report: Question on recurring swapfiles

The swapfiles are created in response to increasing need for memory space.

There is a bug in IE(X) that chews up memory until all memory is used up. Close IE and restart it.