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

There error in question is about system memory (RAM and virtual mem). But you are correct, a runaway process can cause al sorts of problems. It all depends on the particular process and how it failed.

I've just started seeing this on a new Mac Mini server I set up last week. There seem to be a few things from this thread that might be applicable. Just installed an HP printer, hooked up a webcam, and installed Backblaze backups. It's a Mac Mini with 16gb of ram, and about 300GB of free data. Sounds like it could be any of those three that are doing it. It's actually starting up pretty soon after a restart now.

Just open Activity Monitor when it happens and you'll know exactly what the culprit is.

You will actually need to have Activity Monitor running from start up or like me you will spend 20 minutes trying to get the Activity Monitor to run once this situation becomes apparent.

Thats a god point. More savvy used could also just use the 'top' command from a Terminal window to see what process is slowing things down.

Activity Monitor was no help for me.

To find the culprit I had to use process of elimination, seeing what was and was

not running when the problem occurred.

In the end it was i-Glasses. The problem went away when I emailed the maker and

he sent me a new version. He claims it's a system bug that causes some kind of overflow.

Ok, I just started having this issue. Mac Pro, 8GB of RAM, almost 300GB of free hard disk space, running Lion. When I run top in the terminal, it shows me that the virtual memory space has a vsize of 351GB! Here is the output from top:

SharedLibs: 12M resident, 5528K data, 0B linkedit.

MemRegions: 31931 total, 1959M resident, 67M private, 865M shared.

PhysMem: 1233M wired, 2813M active, 1108M inactive, 5154M used, 3036M free.

VM: 351G vsize, 1118M framework vsize, 4773741(0) pageins, 1341714(0) pageouts.

I checked my swap files in /var/vm and there are about 40 1GB files in there, so I don't see how the virtual memory can be reported at 351GB. I'm going to do a reboot to clear the issue up, but it looks like some kind of bug reporting in the size of the virtual memory that makes the OS start to complain about a perceived lack of hard disk space available for swap files.

Another suggestion, if this starts to happen, you may want to run memtest to see if you're having any memory problems. I had a set of bad Corsair memory in mine that was starting to fail and it was manifesting itself through this error.

Also I faced a MAC OS X crash you know the one with the grey box while I was browsing in Safari. I am still using same macbook its working.

I did Disk Utility check from Lion Disk(I made a cd) not drive error. I searched System.log file from console no I/O error.

help please?

This is a bigger issue than Apple is giving it credit to be. I have a three month old iMac - Mid 2011 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 with 16GB 1333 MHZ DDR3 memory - Solid State 250GB drive with only 100GB on it. Then a secondary 2TB drive.

I get the error at least three times a week - while running Safari or Chrome or even just working in Lightroom and Photoshop.

This is a memory leak. I didn't invest in the top of the line iMac to have it in and out of the genius bar constantly since purchase - they have already replaced the 2TB hard drive. I have reinstalled CLEAN INSTALL of OSX twice now and still major issues.

I didn't spend this much on a computer to watch a beach ball....

It's a simple out of memmpry error. Ever single OS ever created has a simular error. What you need to do is use Activity Monitor to locate which program on your machine is the cause. If it was the OS that was a problem, there would be millions of people complaining.

After researching it further I found it is problem with Safari and Flash. I have yet to diagnose the memory leak with Photoshop and Lightroom but have some diagnostic tools installed and will figure it out.

I am still disappointed in the Apple OS as it handles Flash horribly compared to Windows. In fact, after more research, it seems that most Mac users disable Flash so as not to have performance issues on their Macs. This is a HUGE problem. I wish Adobe and Apple would just get together and get it fixed. The way the Mac OS interacts with Flash seems to get worse with every OS release. I guess my easiest option is to buy TV programs through iTunes so I don't have memory problems streaming through Hulu with Flash? :I

One of the reasons I originally switched to Mac was the fact that the Adobe Creative Suite worked so much better on a Mac. However, years down the road it seems as if Adobe and Apple are silently feuding behind the scenes. First the 64 bit release to Windows before Mac and now the new Creative Cloud release that allows one to install programs on either/or/and Mac/Windows it just seems to get easier and easier for Mac users to look to Windows.

I switched to Mac mainly because I was tired of having to reboot my Windows machine every few hours to free up memory just so my applications would work. I find I am now doing that with my Mac anyway - or repairing permissions - it's just frustrating.

This is a repost from another related thread. The problem gets reported in many places, but no-one ever joins the dots to illustrate that it is fundamental memory management bug in the OS.

This is not a problem with particular applications - it's a problem with OS X memory management. Look back through the forums for people having out of disk space, out of memory, runaway swap space etc errors. They go back to at least 2009. Still not fixed. Too busy with iPhone and iOS. This *****!

......

This is an on-going and serious OS X bug. It is NOT confined to Lion, although that may have made it worse for some people. I experienced ths problem with Snow Leopard as well.

The problem is not with any particular apps, although it may start there. You can shut everything down on the system, and the swap will still not be freed. That's an OS X problem, because the processes that generated any memory leak have gone away, but OS X doesn't want to know.

The other symptom you will see is that the system will slow down dramatically, because activitymonitord is chewing up increasing percentages of CPU. I have seen activitymonitord running at over 40% of a CPU. That's impressive, and that was on Snow Leopard.

Apple needs to fix this, but they don't seem to be interested.

One thing I've found to be helpful since I wrote my last post is a little App from the App Store called FreeMemory - this has helped me circumvent the problem becasue it automatically starts freeing up memory when things get low. Although it doesn't help 100% of the time. So I'd agree with you that this still needs to be fixed.

Be careful, Apps like FreeMemory are usually a scam and do nothing.