My harddrive is mysteriously filling up. I am losing GB by the hour. If I reboot I get the space back and then it immediately starts chewing up drive space again.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
Use a utility such as OmniDiskSweeper to find out what files are growing. It's probably a log file.
Thanks for the reply. Very helpful. I have isolated the problem but am not sure why it is occuring, how to prevent it from occuring going forward and if I can simply delete the files.
In the directory called Private/var/vm there is one file called sleepimage that is 2GB and every 5 or 10 minutes another file called "swapfile 0, swapfile 1, etc......" is being created and each are over 1GB in size. my laptop is getting very slow.
Any idea what is causing this and how I can stop it.
You're running a process with a bad memory leak. Launch the Activity Monitor application, select "All Processes" from the menu in the toolbar, and click on the heading of the "Virtual Mem" column to sort the processes by VM usage in descending order. At or near the top you should see one that is guzzling memory.
Linc,
Thanks for the reply. I think we're getting close. Let me tell you what I am seeing.
In the Activity Monitor I am seeing the following:
The headings are as follows:
PDI Process Name User %CPU Threads Real Memory Kind
132 Safari ptilles 5.2 10 439.0 MB Intel (64 bit)
0 kernel_task root 1.6 59 95.0 MB Intel
239 Microsoft Word ptilles 0.3 6 75.6 MB Intel
121 ZumoCast ptilles 0.1 46 71.2 MB Intel
67 WindowServer 1.9 5 50.9 MB Intel (64 bit)
204 Flash Player ptilles 0.8 12 44.9 MB Intel
34 mds root 1.0 7 36.4 MB Intel (64 bit)
120 Dropbox ptilles 0.0 16 32.9 MB Intel
91 Finder ptilles 0.0 9 27.9 MB Intel (64 bit)
123 QuickLookHelper ptilles 182.0 7 26.9 MB Intel (64 bit)
The "quick Look Helper" application appears to be using 182% of CPU which seems unusual even though it is only using 26.9MB of RAM.
I also ran the message console and am seeing the following types of messages.
6/21/11 6:08:40 PM quicklookd[123] [QL] corrupted database
6/21/11 6:08:40 PM quicklookd[123] [QL] error while executing 'CREATE INDEX step_pending_secure_delete_buffer ON pending_secure_delete_buffer (step)': 14 (unable to open database file) (database path: /var/folders/2N/2NMDbLn9HJu1ykgVIGgv7U+++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.QuickLook.thumbn ailcache/index.sqlite)
The above message repeats every second or so.
6/21/11 6:19:15 PM GrowlHelperApp[118] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x414610 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place - just leaking
The above message repeats every 5 seconds or so.
Could either of these be realted to creating the swapfiles and if so, what would you recommend I do?
Thanks!
Stop Growl in its preference pane and see whether the leaking stops. Also delete the QuickLook cache file indicated.
In activity monitor is says my VM is running around 160GB, but there doesn't appear to be anything using that much VM.
I've deleted 80+GB of data in the past day, but my hard drive keeps filling up.
In console I'm seeing this series of messages repeating, but is only keeping the last 4000 entries. In the /var folder my log file isn't very large.
8/14/11 10:18:07 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[166] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
8/14/11 10:18:17 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[166] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper[704]) posix_spawn("/Applications/MacKeeper.app/Contents/Resources/Helper.app/Contents /MacOS/Helper", ...): No such file or directory
8/14/11 10:18:17 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[166] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper[704]) Exited with exit code: 1
I don't think I've ever installed MacKeeper, but i downloaded a utility to help delete it just in case. Seems to have run.
I don't think I've ever installed MacKeeper...
Yes you have, or someone has. MacKeeper. I might have known. Get that crap off your system immediately -- all of it.
Ran this utility. Will restart my system to see if has helped.
First restart attempt it announced my drive was very full and the finder didn't launch, (but a couple of other apps did launch). I restarted again and when the finder first came up it showed me having 125GB of free disk space, but while Firefox was loading it dropped back down to almost nothing.
You filled up 125 GB of space in just the time it took Firefox to launch? Are you sure about that?
Googling a little bit, this terrible quicklookd issue is due to the app Transmission. Somewhere an other app was doubted to be the culprit: Perian, the newest version 1.2 Do you have one of them installed? What is telling the Terminal if you enter
defaults read com.apple.quicklook.plist
?
marek
Positive. Just happened again, though when I switched back to the finder this time it showed me having 127GB free space.
Firefox wasn't open the previous times this happened.
I don't have Transmission installed, but I do have the latest version of Perian. Will try disabling it.
Haven't tried safe mode yet, have some work to do. I'm getting warning messages about a full hard drive, but a quick check of the Finder shows no issue.
My harddrive is mysteriously filling up
