Caching service low on disk space

Your mac, your call.

This thing is not doing anything to protect your mac.

Your mac is vulnerable because it cannot run an up to date OS, and can no longer receive security updates.

But that vulnerability is not lessened by using this.

I will let someone far more knowledgeable and more articulate than myself explain:

Effective defenses against malware and other threats

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/configure-advanced-content-caching-settings-mchl91e7141a/11.0/mac/11.0

It would be helpful if you could tell me which of these parameters applies. I don't know which of three drives is being used for the cache nor why caching is necessary at all on a simple file server.

It is not exactly clear what cache this is.

Is this an OS message or from some application? Can you post a screenshot?

The most likely explanation is that you may be running very low in free disk space.

How much is there?

You may want to run Etrecheck and post its full report here.

That depends on what you want to do about the alert. If you want to stop the alerts from appearing, change the DisplayAlerts option. If you want to increase the cache size or reduce the reserve space, change the CacheLimit and/or ReservedVolumeSpace options. If you want to turn off content caching altogether, run: AssetCacheManagerUtil deactivate.

One reason why the content caching pane might not appear in System Preferences > Sharing is if you are running macOS in a virtual machine. Is your macOS virtual, or running natively on a Mac? You might have to change the options or deactivate on the base OS rather than in the VM.

There are three drives on the computer which sent the message. All three have at least 75GB free, so I don't even know which one is "low on space" because none are. The OS is El Capitan. There is no "Content Caching" service in System Preferences - Sharing, so I cannot even turn it off. Web searches all go back to that service setting, which does not exist on this machine. It is frustrating.

I am sorry, at the start you said it was Big Sur, now it is El Capitan... which is it?

Two things you can do:

1) Restart in Safe Mode, and then restart normally again

2) Run the diagnostic tool Etrecheck and post its full report here, so we can know more and look por causes of issues.

Your 2008 mac cannot go higher than El Capitan, so no further OS upgrades exist for it.

You must uninstall the symantec/norton thing. It offers zero protection, causes performance degradation and is likely what is causing the present issue.

My mistake. It is definitely El Capitan OS on old hardware. Attached is Etrecheck report. I know the hardware and OS are obsolete. We are planning upgrades later this year.

The message given is the entire message. It appears to be a system message because I get it as an email alert..

I would be happy to just turn off the alerts, if you could give me the correct syntax. If that breaks something, I would be sure to get a more helpful error message.

If you let your disk space run low and turn off all the alerts you are seriously risking not just performance but ultimately data loss.

How much free space is there???

NOT going to uninstall Enterprise-level antivirus which we have been using for more than a decade, long before these alerts started happening.

I don't set company policy. I'm marking this is solved as it is going nowhere.