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

I just got this error today running iMac with 16 GB of memory and 1 TB Fusion drive (700 GB free). I wasn't running any apps that I don't normally run, and none of them *should* have been taxing the system. I guess there could have been a recent update to an app that is now causing a memory leak... I have OS X v10.8.4. I've read most of this thread, and what I'm wondering is: Is there room for improvement in the OS to avoid what happened to me today? The OS stopped responding to the point where I could not even Force Close applications. I had to power down the hard way. It would be nice if the OS could reserve enough juice for me to help it recover instead of requiring a hard reboot. If I can look at the Activity Monitor and know there's a "culprit", then I'm wondering if the OS can do that for me... and then pre-emptively cut that process off at the knees while informing me that it needs attention.

What you are suggesting is probably possable but it would really upset power users who (like me) prefer to keep tabs on whats going on in their system. Plus it would be tricky for an automated system to know weather a process is in fact out of control or simply needs all the resources it can grab.

A system like you sugges is probably more appropreate for something like an iPad, where the goal really IS to hide all the technical, nerdy OS stuff from the user.

hi!

happened the same to me during this week :/

i've been backing up my imac (running osx 10.8.2 with 4G ram 1TB hard disk/ +730GB free) no applications open and suddenly i get this message

i'm backing it up because it started giving me problems with permissions and i think i have my profile somewhat corrupt and i want to format and clean install osx...

the problem is that now i can't even run carcon copy to the end 😟

did you manage to fix this?

are you sure that there is no application running? Try to check your dock and see if there is a light on the software icon. I can manage my problem by unistalling the software that cause this problem. In my case, Adobe Photoshop.

Hi, storrao.

I'm not sure I did anything to fix it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it popped up again.

I did the usual... turn it off, turn it on, run disk check, run permission check.

It hasn't reoccured yet, and I'm running the same apps I always run. I don't tax the system heavily and I shut down my apps when I'm not using them.

I am keeping a Finder window open to the virtual memory folder now, but so far, it has not budged. There's one file there that is 67MB is size.

I guess if I started to see a huge increase in the number and size of files there, then I will examine which apps are using up the resources and maybe find the one that's leaking. Although, I'm not entirely convinced that any of them are leaking since I've seen weird things with Mac OS X over the years and wouldn't disqualify this being a bug.

I agree with what Kevin said (above), but IMHO, there is no excuse for an OS to allow itself to get to the point where the user is completely locked out and has to power off the system. (This has happened to me on Linux servers and has happened frequently on windoze which I rarely us any more, so I'm not picking on Mac OS X, I'm picking on all OS's that have this issue -- and my old roommate would say "Then, write your own OS!")

Try deleting all your cookies in your internet browser. It made my message stop popping up.

Can you offer any suggestion for a similar issue on an early 2009 MBP running Lion? (I know this is a Snow Leopard discussion, but it is the best thread on this topic that i have found so far). I have followed all of your suggestions about using activity monitor to find the culprit, and here is what I found: with no programs open, loginwindow and SystemUIServer are devouring Real Mem. After my laptop being on for 20 minutes, they have used 1.88 and 1.85 GB respectively and counting. No other acvtivities are using an increasing amount of real mem. Further, when I open a program, (in this case I opened VLC and Onyx) they too begin to devour Real Mem at an alarming rate. Further, the increase in real mem usage by loginwindow and SystemUIServer speeds up with the applications open. Keep in mind that Onyx and VLC are open but not actually being used at the time.

Same thing here, I'm on a MBPro 2010 8gb Ram

I think it's weird that everyone has having this issue right now, the first thing that comes to mind is some kind of virus

By the way, I restored from a previous backup and uninstalled Chrome. I'm using Safari right now. The problem disappeared (so far at least).

Is it a Chrome problem? Maybe a faulty update? I think the problem is browser-related

I've got a 12GB memory and 1TB HD plus 1TB external HD. I've been using Chrome after that security problem with Safari. Just restarted my iMac and going to use Safari again now that they've done a fix update and see how that goes. Only bought my iMac last year do shouldn't expect to have problems this soon.

Hi Y'all,

my problem is slightly different being that it does not apply to "application memory" or at least that is not the error message.

I was downloading music recently and tried to import it into ITunes when a message popped up stating something like, "will copy as much as possible. No more space on ------ HD available".

At the same time, Dropbox was not letting me upload music to it even though I had over 50% of space available.

And when I tried to unzip a file, it was cancelled due to "no more space for extraction".

This is all happening even though I have 151 GB of free space!

I am not sure why this is happening and would appreciate any input.

Thanks

-Dan

MacBook Pro, iOS 8.1

MacbookPro, OS X 10.6.8 WITH 1 TB HARD DRIVE AND 8 GIG RAM..........was receiving the dreaded dialogue box: "Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space available for applications memory." We went to the Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder) and opened it. With ALL applications QUIT, there were some items listed in the monitor that were hogging memory as I watched them.....even though we did not have any applications running. I selected each memory hog and then clicked the red "Quit Process" button in the top left side of the monitor window. My Mac immediately returned to normal operation........at least for now!