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

"Local snapshots" only happen with portable Mac (laptops) that have TimeMachine enabled with an external drive and the external drive is not available (it, your on the road).

From the link you posted:

"Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion initiates a sometimes useful, sometimes not feature: local backups. Called snapshots, this seems to be kicked off when your primary Mac is a laptop and the Time Machine backup is an external drive,"

i.e. "local snapshots" only happen on a laptop when you enable Time Machine with an external dive.

Time Machine is off by default.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4878

Did you discover which app was stealing all of your memory with Activity Monitor?

Don't eat crow. It isn't "an application." It's the worst memory management you can get. Go googling on this topic, and you'll find more and more folks realising that OS X memory management is garbage.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3221471

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3533916

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1858205?answerId=8775428022#8775428022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3114607

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2156286?answerId=10752742022#10752742022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1401416?start=15&tstart=0

http://www.osnews.com/comments/25861

http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-deeply-broken-in-os-x- memory-management

Do your own search. See how many of these you can turn up.

If you search google for people with Windows 7 getting an "out of memory" error you will come across thousands of hits. That doesn't mean Window 7 has a memory handeling problem.

numinasthmatic wrote:

Don't eat crow. It isn't "an application." It's the worst memory management you can get. Go googling on this topic, and you'll find more and more folks realising that OS X memory management is garbage.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3221471

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3533916

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1858205?answerId=8775428022#8775428022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3114607

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2156286?answerId=10752742022#10752742022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1401416?start=15&tstart=0

http://www.osnews.com/comments/25861

http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-deeply-broken-in-os-x- memory-management

Do your own search. See how many of these you can turn up.

I could probably search more, and find even more people having problems with OS X memory management.

I read most of every link you posted above, either, the problem was solved to be a third party problem, it was an old post that probably has resolved itself (and again probably user error and third party problem), or the problem was actually solved! None of these cases, and the more that I found, were not actual problems with OS X memory management.

Just like in Windows, it's not recommended to modify the memory management processes. I saw many cases of where people were modifying the paging, or VM activity, and any improvements were an eventual, illusion. I thought deactivating the dynamic pager was a pretty crazy idea! I suppose if you don't run out of physical memory, but still, that could cause problems even if you have memory left over. I'm going to try that with a Windows machine and see what happens (I don't think it'll turnout very well).

Memory Management in OS X seems to be very good. I have seen programs that use a lot of memory, my only annoying thing I found is the OS X will only use up to 63 Swap files (just under 64 GB, or 59 GiB; GibiBytes) when I had a program that needed more memory. This (third party) program was horribly bad with memory usage, but OS X did a beautiful job of supplying the memory. OS X actually "paused" the program without it crashing, until it found more memory, when I freed up more memory, it resumed. (Pretty cool! I've only seen this once). I thought that was impressive, pausing a program till it get's more memory. (Again, the program itself a horrible job of using memory, it could have done more with less memory if written better, and it wasn't an Apple program!)

Again, every link you posted, it was a third party process/app, or user error that caused the "problem" (or apparent problem) in OS X memory management.

Right now, I'm using 11.8 GB of RAM, less than 1 GB is inactive, I have 16 GB total. There are 2.11 GB of page ins (ok/good thing) and 0 GB of page outs (very nice thing), and 0 GB of Swap used (obvious, and nice also). (There is of course a 64 MB swap file "swapfile0", it's always there).

I had this same issue. It was easily resolved by booting my computer from the OS X installer disc and repairing my disk and disk permissions using Disk Utility. It sounds like you have incorrect block counts on some of your files and it's throwing your system out of whack. This will 100% fix this issue. Have a great day. 🙂

Ron - how do I boot from an installer disk if I installed Mountain Lion through the app store?

Hi Jason,

MacWorld has a good article on that...

http://www.macworld.com/article/1165337/create_a_bootable_lion_install_drive_for _newer_macs.html

I hope this works for you. 😀

Jason Sheen wrote:

Ron - how do I boot from an installer disk if I installed Mountain Lion through the app store?

From the recovery partition that ML installs, boot to it and repair your disk 😐

And to aid in reducing confusion, you should post about Mountain Lion in the Mountain Lion forum, this one is for Snow Leopard.

There are varying issue's happening here, its not one consistant problem guys. Currently as of 8/26 there is definitely issues with an HP Monitoring Service that came out that is sucking up memory. I had 1.4GB of memory sitting there for it to monitor my printer. *** SORRY HP, I DON'T THINK SO ***

There are also some issues with chrome presently, especially if your surfing a lot of windows/tabs at the same time and on it for long periods with no reboots.

Simply run activity monitor and see what is eating your memory, end the task. Will that solve the problem, most likely for now, but I personally am not going to stop using Chrome, so until a patch comes out, you'll have to watch. As for HP, I expect there to be a patch on that soon as to the huge obvious impact, but who knows. I can live with out a printer monitor for now.

As for Memory Problems with Mac OS X, sure there are some things that can always improve, but if you look at memory handling vs windows (any verison you want), there is no comparison.

PS some of these updates happen right after you do a clean install and Max OS updates, so you could start seeing this right of the box. That HP update happened a short while ago for me and it was breaking my system like crazy!

Stephen

Stephen,

Suddenly having memory problems on my MacPro desktop. I recently bought a new HP 7500A printer and installed the software so I could fax, scan, etc. I found the HP Monitoring Service sucking up memory - over 1.4GB! I quit it on activity monitor and then uninstalled the HP application. My Mac seems to be OK now. Good tip - Thank you!

Carol

I beleive that you are correct !! that is surprising !! my HP is using 1.6 GB out of my 4GB Ram!!!!!

I cant see it until I show All Process in Activity Monitor!! when force quitting it every thing goes back to normal and the pie chart have almost 50% Green/ free area!!

I dont know what happened, 2 days ago I have printed 200 papers, but now it want print 30!!! I will have to contact HP in this regard,

Thanks alot Stephen for this hint.

Dalal

You are correct. Mem management in Mtn Lion is fine. I now have two machines that run it (a Retina MacBook Pro with 16gb, and a daul quad Xeon Mac Pro with 8gm).

If you suspect a mem problem, all you have to do is load the Activity Monitor and take a look at which app is at fault. HP drivers are a common one.

verified disk & repaired disk permission worked. THAX!!

My problem is Safari. How do I fix that? Also, every time I try to bookmark a website in Safari, it locks up completely.