OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory

Barbara Daniels1 wrote:
if all the virtual memory is already being used and only 19 MB of RAM are readily "available" and an application requiring more than that is launched - could that possibly be the explanation for the message?

It might be, except for the fact that it's not just the 19 MB of RAM that's "available". "Inactive" RAM is available as well for very little additional overhead.

Well, what I would suggest at this point is to either call Apple (if you're still under warranty) and/or make an appointment at your nearest Genius Bar. Make sure you take along a copy of that cryptic error message. I'm guessing it has to do with RAM, but I could be totally wrong.

You can talk to a Genius free of charge as far as I know. Are you referring to Best Buy with "BB"? I would at least get a free diagnosis from Apple before taking it to Best Buy - I've heard their Geek Squad/repair people are very PC oriented and not too knowledgeable with Macs.

I am also having this issue. I have a new-ish 27" iMac with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. I have 690GB free on that drive. I am still getting these errors from time-to-time. It's a little concerning, but I really want to figure out what's at the root of this so that I can avoid it in the future.
My biggest issue is that - if we're talking about the swap file here - I have 690GB free. No swap file on earth should get that large. It's not like I'm editing all of NASA's imagery at the same time. I do have Parallels running, and I am taxing my system. My physical ram (again, 8GB) is frequently maxed out. I just can't imagine why the swap space would be insufficient. I've only noticed this since 10.6.6, BUT my usage patterns also changed around that same time. I am now running more memory-intensive apps in both Parallels and OS X.
Any help?


Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac11,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 8 MB
Memory: 8 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: IM111.0034.B02
SMC Version (system): 1.54f36
Macintosh HD:
Capacity: 999.86 GB (999,860,912,128 bytes)
Available: 689.25 GB (689,246,728,192 bytes)
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk0s2
Mount Point: /

...and a little more detail about my swap space:
Size: 59GB
Page Ins: 1,148,437
Page Outs: 652,364

So far, it appears that everyone is stumped by your issue; where did you get the "word" that your hardware is ok? Did they do some testing at the Apple Store?

If it is a software issue, I guess the next logical step would be to do a fresh install - it is pretty difficult to come up with sound recommendations since we have no idea what the cause is. I'm reluctant to recommend a restore since your backups may have the same problem, so I'd say do an actual erase and install from your install disk and, after bringing the OS software up to date, only move over one file or app at a time - making sure everything works as it should before attempting to move over the next one. Make sure to repair permissions in between and restart.

If someone has a better idea, please do post it!

samchr wrote:
Page Outs: 652,364

I'd agree that you're taxing your RAM. What version of OS X are you running? (You can use the "My Settings" link to declare that.) Is Windows paging as much under Parallels? (No, I don't know how to determine that.) If not, perhaps there is a way to tell Parallels to give less RAM to Windows.

Have you tried booting into 64 bit mode?

As you can tell from the rest of this thread, so far there are no good answers for this problem.

I'm no expert in this matter but I can add the following from personal experience. My system is an iMac, 4 gig ram and 250 gig free on the internal.

I have had this issue twice, once when iTunes 10.2.1 did a sync. It was the first sync performed under 10.2.1. A restart got rid of the issue. The second time was when my dsl line had issues and pp0e (handled by the Mac, not the router or modem) was constantly attempting to log-in. Again, a restart solved the problem.

If you have disk space available, think software and what its doing that might cause the issue.

I have also recently been experiencing this. It may have also started after a sync with iTunes 10.2.1, but I discovered just now that it was my HP Device Monitor process that was consuming all of the memory. I killed that process and recovered > 2Gb of RAM. The process restarted automatically and didn't begin consuming memory again. I haven't tried printing yet though...

Hope this helps.

I got the same message two times yesterday and today. Yesterday I got this when I was upgrading my iPad to 4.3.1. Today I I saw it when I inserted my CF card to prepare to load photo to iPhoto.

I have 35G free space out of 160G total (yes I have an old iMac), 3G RAM,( which is already max out.).

I have far lower than this hard disk space before and never seen this msg.

Checking console log for both msg, it looks like in both cases, backup application (The one from MobileMe) was running, not sure if it is related.

Message was edited by: Superzhou

Message was edited by: Superzhou

Superzhou wrote:
I got the same message two times yesterday and today.

How long had that Mac been running since the last boot? Have you tried a Disk Utility "verify disk" operation to check for any disk corruption?