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

We recently had the same problem and had plenty of space on the hard drive 500 gig out of 1 TB. Pull up the console in utilities and see if you see anything strange in there. For our particular problem Google Chrome had a memory leak. The activity monitor in utilities also showed HP device monitor was using 357% of the CPU and 4 gig of memory. After killing the HP device monitor and Google chrome the out of space on the startup disk message went away. I also recreated the problem by starting Chrome again and the console clearly showed there was a memory leak. So, if you have plenty of disk space check these two utilities to get an idea on what application is causing the problem. Good luck!

my wife's imac had the same thing happen only after i bought a new HP printer and downloaded the new software. i see many of these posts have HP high activity inthe monitor.

I think it is their issue.

Also have this issue. In my case PID4729 Process Name:Safari Web Content was using 6.81GB of memory, leaving 39MB Free. Even though 3.51GB was showing as inactive I still got the message.

Inactive memory isn't really free, it's in a kind of limbo. If that's real memory, 6.81 for Safari suggests a severe memory leak there. 39MB free just isn't enough.

Activity Monitor> Memory what are the page outs?

Also open Terminal and type in "top" (no quotation marks) then hit return. What are the figures inside the parenthesis?

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/lackofram.html

see

Determine how much paging your system is performing

SOLVED!!! (for me, anyway)

I have Mac powerbook pro (Dec 2011), ) OS10.7.2 (LION)

Error message started with

Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space

available for appliaion memory.

But after that every thing was frozen.

I narrowed the problem down to a program I use called iglasses. I solved it by installing

the version 3.1 Beta. Now, no more crashes with the above error message. I asked Ken

at ecamm.com (the nice makers of iglasses) what the problem was, that he fixed with his beta version 3.1

and he wrote this:

"I was able to work around a bug in Apple's Unsharp Mask Core Image filter when it's used with the Intel HD3000 graphics card. It was leaking memory with each frame, causing virtual memory to grow out of control. Virtual memory is disk-backed memory, and that caused the hard disk to eventually fill up. Once the vm page file fills up the hard disk, no more memory (or disk space) is available for the kernel or applications, and everything just falls over. It's very unusual for it to happen that way and I've never seen it happen before, but that's what it was! 😉 The solution was to restrict the range of input parameters to that filter to avoid the bug which only happened with certain parameters."

So, even if you are not using iglasses, perhaps the problem is still from the HD3000 graphics card?

Anyway, my problem was basically solved by process of elimination. What things were running when crashes occured and what things were not when they did not.

Had the same issue today (MacBook Pro Oct 2011, OSX Lion 10.7.2). As far as I can figure, it was somehow caused by internet difficulties at my workplace. I had only one application running, and I was still getting the error message every few minutes. Didn't check Disk Utilities then since everything kept freezing up, but the memory couldn't possibly have been full with only 1 application open. I restarted 3 times, but it didn't help at all. I did still have the internet cord attached, since I was hoping for restored service. I'm wondering if there was somehow a leak through that connection…

Anyway, when internet was finally restored, I restarted again and have experienced absolutely no more problems. I didn't change anything. Checked Disk Utilites when all was over, and have very low %CPU (all under 10), page ins 378.6MB, page outs 0 bytes, swap used 0 bytes. It seems the problem is over without my doing anything at all. It must be due to an outside cause (in my case, internet woes).

A search through the posts reveals a number of similar issues. It is unfortunat there is no way to aggregate issues when becoming aware of this. My almost identical issue arose during the attempt to sync my address book with my new icloud contacts list. The attempt basically froze my maz for four hours , consummed around 70gig of hdd and burnt up 9 gig of my broadband bandwidtrh - all without managing to do the one thing I wanted which was the sync. Obviously there is something going on inside Lion!

Just started having the same issue, 24" iMac (early 2009) / 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo / 8GB DDR3 / 630GB HDD with 281GB free space / Lion 10.7.3.

Ive had this twice in as many days, with only a few apps running on the second occasion (finder/chrome/mail/app store).

I suspect a memory leak, with Chrome being my number 1 suspect at the moment.

Am monitoring and will update if I find the culprit.

What ever it is it is temp or swapfiles being created. I turned off wifi last night and then attempted to run the find duplicates in my address book. It ran very slowly , possibly because somewhere in the translation from 10.4.8 to 10.6 to 10.7 I have magically gone from a couple of hundred contacts to 24,000. (That's a separate issue.)

I had no other applications running. When I came back to the imac today I had the full disk message and the request to close an application.

Closed the only application open - address book. Restarted the imac and got back 90gig. The find duplicates program had got less than 1/6 of the way through on its status bar.

Apple. I'd say it's a bug

I am very nearly positive this is an Apple bug. I have started to see this really start to occur in 10.7.3. I too have over 30GB free on my primary volume (my ssd system disk as I'm running ZFS for my home and other volumes). Further, I have 20GB of RAM.

It just started happening after about the middle or end of the beta phase of the 10.7.3 update for me so I'm hopeful that it's something we can get enough bug reports for to get addressed soon. Memory management for Mac OS X has been in decline, particularly with regards to the kernel. I mourn because of the lack of attention we're getting at the core os level. Everything is focusing on the frameworks and UI/UX, which I understand due to the success of iOS platforms... however we're all suffering while not enough attention is being given to the kernel.

We should really all speak up and submit feedback.

Everyone, this is not an Apple bug. You are merely getting an "out of memmory" message. If you open the Activity Monitor when you're getting this error you will quickly discover which process is causing the problem.

Kevin this does not appear to be the case for me. I have this without errant processes consuming inordinant amounts of RAM.

Kevin. If it is not a bug I would be interested to know why I can no longer access Address ook without it basically hogging my ram , CPU and eventually every spare bit of memory on my HDD.

This was never the case until I installed LION.

You will notice that address book is consuming 100.1% of my CPU

If I turn force quit address book the next process demanding CPU is just more than 3%

You are the first person here to mention Address book. It sounds to me like you might have a problem with your Address Book database. I use Address Book daily on Lion without issue, but I only have a few hundred contacts.

The only point I would like to make everyone clear of is that this specific error (mentioned in the original post) is a very general error that simply means your machine is out of RAM. To find out why, you need to open Activity Monitor and have a look at running processes.

Kevin I don't believe it is just a RAM and process issue. What ever causes this also takes up all the CPU and will concurrently fill the hard-disk with temp files. This is when the message appears. My first occurance saw around 70gig of hard disk disappear until I managed to halt all processes and restart my Imac at which point I got the disk space back.