Disk full message

Question

Level 1

25 points

Disk full message

I have recently being receiving these messages:

http://www.waldonell.com/images/diskfull.png

yet I have ample free disk space. What's up?

waldo@vcs ~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk1s2 931Gi 549Gi 382Gi 60% /
devfs 134Ki 134Ki 0Bi 100% /dev
map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /net
map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /home

Mac Pro 8 Core, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Oct 14, 2009 3:58 PM

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Answer 1

Oct 14, 2009 4:04 PM in response to Waldo Nell1

My guess is that you may have some temporary files that are bogging down your hard drive.

This link lets you see hidden files in Finder; see if you find some massive temporary files residing somewhere in your Home folder, at the root level of your startup disk, or in a Library folder.

Alternatively, do these messages show up whenever you launch a program? What about right after quitting a program? Basically, when do these messages show up, and/or is there a pattern to the occurances?

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Answer 2

Waldo Nell1 Author

Level 1

25 points

Oct 14, 2009 4:28 PM in response to musicwind95

If it was due to temp files df would not have shown 382GB free disk space on my root drive. It happens randomly.

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Answer 3

thomas_r.

Level 7

32,031 points

Oct 14, 2009 4:33 PM in response to Waldo Nell1

It would if the temp file had been removed by the time you ran df. What about answers to the other good questions that were asked by musicwind95?

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Answer 4

Waldo Nell1 Author

Level 1

25 points

Oct 14, 2009 4:58 PM in response to thomas_r.

I thought I did. I answered all the questions when I said it happens randomly. This implies no pattern. I will be busy typing text in to an editor the next moment this box will pop up, and then spotlight will start rebuilding its index.

I cannot see how it can be temp files. This happened twice now, and both times I checked within 4 seconds of getting that message. I cannot see how any process can write 380GB of data to a SATA drive that quickly to fill it up. It takes 1.5 hours at 70MB/s to write that amount of data, and it takes at least 10 seconds to delete it.

waldo@vcs ~ $ sudo du -x -h -s /
551G /

That is the true amount of disk space used. It is a 1TB drive.

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Answer 5

Waldo Nell1 Author

Level 1

25 points

Oct 14, 2009 5:05 PM in response to Waldo Nell1

Also I did not run any fancy GUI apps since the unix tools will pick up hidden files, and hidden files will still consume disk space when checked with du and df.

Here a list of helpful system log entries:
Oct 14 15:51:03 vcs [0x0-0x4e04e].com.jetbrains.intellij[707]: 15:51:03,442 INFO [WorkspaceImpl] Saved workspace to [/Users/waldo/intellij-soapui-workspace.xml]
Oct 14 15:51:03 vcs [0x0-0x4e04e].com.jetbrains.intellij[707]: 15:51:03,444 INFO [DefaultSoapUICore] Settings saved to [/Users/waldo/soapui-settings.xml]
Oct 14 15:51:17 vcs KernelEventAgent[64]: tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_LOWDISK, VQ_VERYLOWDISK (516)
Oct 14 15:51:17 vcs [0x0-0x2c02c].com.apple.Terminal[379]: Terminal has detected that you are running low on swap space. Large buffers have been trimmed in an attempt to reclaim memory....
Oct 14 15:51:17 vcs KernelEventAgent[64]: tid 00000000 type 'hfs', mounted on '/', from '/dev/disk1s2', low disk, very low disk
Oct 14 15:51:17 vcs KernelEventAgent[64]: tid 00000001 display lowdiskwarning: generating verylowdisk warning for volume 'Mac Pro HD'
Oct 14 15:51:17 vcs KernelEventAgent[64]: tid 00000000 found 1 filesystem(s) with problem(s)
Oct 14 15:51:17 vcs Mail[2873]: Mail: SafetyNet not needed - wrongState:0
Oct 14 15:51:22: --- last message repeated 1 time ---
Oct 14 15:51:22 vcs [0x0-0x2c02c].com.apple.Terminal[379]: Swap space has returned to a safe level. Terminal is returning to normal scrollback buffer behavior
Oct 14 15:51:22 vcs KernelEventAgent[64]: tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_LOWDISK (4)
Oct 14 15:51:22 vcs com.apple.AppleFileServer[263]: MDSChannelPeerRequest: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Oct 14 15:51:23 vcs mds[62]: (Error) Server: Peer checkin failed -- no store for path '/Users/waldo'
Oct 14 15:51:23 vcs com.apple.AppleFileServer[263]: MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument
Oct 14 15:51:25 vcs mds[62]: (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /
Oct 14 15:51:26 vcs pbs[4116]: Malformed Services entries in Info.plist for Service at URL /Applications/TeX/LaTeXiT.app\n The value for key NSTimeOut was supposed to be of type NSString, but instead it was of type NSNumber\n The value for key NSTimeOut was supposed to be of type NSString, but instead it was of type NSNumber\n The value for key NSTimeOut was supposed to be of type NSString, but instead it was of type NSNumber\n The value for key NSTimeOut was supposed to be of type NSString, but instead it was of type NSNumber\n The value for key NSTimeOut was supposed to be of type NSString, but instead it was of type NSNumber\n The value for key NSTimeOut was supposed to be of type NSString, but instead it was of type NSNumber
Oct 14 15:51:26 vcs mds[62]: (Error) Server: Peer checkin failed -- no store for path '/Users/waldo'
Oct 14 15:51:26 vcs com.apple.AppleFileServer[263]: MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument
Oct 14 15:51:26 vcs iCal[357]: Queue operation succeeded
Oct 14 15:51:33: --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Oct 14 15:51:33 vcs mds[62]: (Error) Server: Peer checkin failed -- no store for path '/Users/waldo'
Oct 14 15:51:33 vcs com.apple.AppleFileServer[263]: MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument
Oct 14 15:51:33 vcs mds[62]: (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /
Oct 14 15:51:34 vcs Mail[2873]: Mail Operation: success
Oct 14 15:51:41 vcs Mail[2873]: Mail: SafetyNet not needed - wrongState:0
Oct 14 15:51:45 vcs KernelEventAgent[64]: tid 00000001 display lowdiskwarning: verylowdisk warning for volume 'Mac Pro HD' removed

Message was edited by: Waldo Nell1

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Answer 6

Oct 14, 2009 5:41 PM in response to Waldo Nell1

I notice that there is an entry dated Oct 14 15:51:17: "Terminal has detected that you are running low on swap space." I'm not sure what the second part means, but it could be that a portion of your hard drive was "allocated" to swap space. By "allocated", I mean that Finder sees the space as used up, but nothing is actually written to it, it just appears used up, and that is why your UNIX command still reported all that free space.

After that 15:51:26 entry things start to look interesting, but I can't make sense of them. If anyone else knows that all that means...

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Answer 7

Oct 14, 2009 8:45 PM in response to musicwind95

And note that only 5 seconds later, there is this report:

Oct 14 15:51:22 vcs 0x0-0x2c02c.com.apple.Terminal379: Swap space has returned to a safe level. Terminal is returning to normal scrollback buffer behavior

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Answer 8

Oct 15, 2009 11:47 AM in response to Charles E. Flynn

But in that five seconds, the message was displayed. The message wouldn't just go away by itself after the swap has been returned to a safe level.

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Answer 9

Oct 15, 2009 11:48 AM in response to Waldo Nell1

I have to ask, how much RAM do you have, and what computer are you using? Try quitting some programs, especially large memory hogs.

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Answer 10

Waldo Nell1 Author

Level 1

25 points

Oct 16, 2009 1:35 PM in response to musicwind95

Doubt that is the issue. I have 18GB RAM in a Mac Pro '08 Xeon 8 core 2.8GHz system, with about 10GB free RAM.

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Answer 11

Oct 17, 2009 8:52 AM in response to Waldo Nell1

I notice that you've never answered my previous question:

Do these messages follow a pattern? For instance, do they show up right before you launch a program, right after you quit it, or right after you click on something specific?

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Answer 12

Waldo Nell1 Author

Level 1

25 points

Oct 18, 2009 2:14 PM in response to musicwind95

musicwind95 wrote:
I notice that you've never answered my previous question:

Do these messages follow a pattern? For instance, do they show up right before you launch a program, right after you quit it, or right after you click on something specific?

I did - I said: "I thought I did. I answered all the questions when I said it happens randomly. This implies no pattern. I will be busy typing text in to an editor the next moment this box will pop up, and then spotlight will start rebuilding its index."

Message was edited by: Waldo Nell1

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Answer 13

Oct 18, 2009 3:48 PM in response to Waldo Nell1

Does Spotlight rebuild its index every time? This implies that it could be Spotlight at fault.

I just noticed that Console says that it found 1 filesystem with problem(s) at the same time that the low disk space message appeared. Open Disk Utility and do a Verify/Repair on both Permissions and Disk (you may have to reboot and run Disk Utility off of Snow Leopard's install disk to do that), and see if that does anything.

In addition, this section looks interesting. If anyone can make out something from it, that might be useful:

Oct 14 15:51:22 vcs KernelEventAgent64: tid 00000000 received event(s) VQ_LOWDISK (4)
Oct 14 15:51:22 vcs com.apple.AppleFileServer263: MDSChannelPeerRequest: (ipc/send) invalid destination port
Oct 14 15:51:23 vcs mds62: (Error) Server: Peer checkin failed -- no store for path '/Users/waldo'
Oct 14 15:51:23 vcs com.apple.AppleFileServer263: MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument
Oct 14 15:51:25 vcs mds62: (Normal) DiskStore: Rebuilding index for /
Oct 14 15:51:26 vcs pbs4116: Malformed Services entries in Info.plist for Service at URL

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Answer 14

Dec 18, 2009 9:45 PM in response to musicwind95

Today my wife's MacBookPro (120 GB drive) showed only 12GB free. This is unusual because she does absolutely nothing involving large files. Also her Time Machine sparse bundle was around 40GB. I found a 56GB file in Private/Var/Logs (I think that was the path) and trashed it as well as a few other files (logs) in the same location. Something is causing OS X 10.6.2 to amass , in certain cases, these huge log files. This falls into the "bug" category and, to anyone without sufficient computer skills, represents a serious problem. On the other hand, I have nearly 6TB of drives (3.25 in the machine) and have rarely had this problem . . . different machine? . . . . different maintenance habits? Regardless, this should NOT happen ever.

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