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Level 1

14 points

Starting a week ago, my hard disk keeps filling up over a 15 minute period

If I don't notice this is happening, the disk gets 100% full, I have to force quit all my applications and reboot. If I do notice that it is happening, I have time to shut down myself. When I reboot, I'm back to normal - with 25 GB free on a 480 GB SSD.

I've tried running lsof to see what files are being written and by what, but looking at the output, I can't see anything abnormal. It isn't TimeMachine doing a local snapshot or local backup - I've disabled that with tmutil. It isn't a normal log file going beserk because those don't get deleted in a reboot. It isn't network activity because I don't see my networking going wild and transferring 25 GB across the network would take more than the 15 minutes in which my system fills up and crashes. After every reboot, the file system is back to normal with 25 GB free.

Sometimes this happens overnight, sometimes it happens while I'm working on the system. For example, it started happening at 9:15 this morning but I didn't notice until it hit 100% and all I could do was shutdown and reboot. It has happened 6 times in the last week.

Any ideas? Any diagnostics I could run to learn more about what is happening?

I'm on a MacBook Pro 15-inch, Mid 2010 with 8 GB running 10.8.4.

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), MacBook Pro (6,2) 15" i7 8GB, 500GB, Hi-res

Posted on Jul 17, 2013 7:13 AM

17 replies

inquisitive7 Author

Level 1

14 points

Aug 29, 2013 6:14 AM in response to nbar

nbar - agreed. This is a huge memory leak in iTunes or something that iTunes runs. Something triggers iTunes to gobble up memory and the system responds by allocating more and more swap space until my disk is full. I've reinstalled iTunes and I'll see if it happens again.

When you say "reinstall ML", to what are you referring?

inquisitive7 Author

Level 1

14 points

Sep 5, 2013 4:41 AM in response to inquisitive7

Confirmed - it is iTunes. I'm running iTunes 11.0.5 on Mac OS X 10.8.4. I've reinstalled iTunes from the binaries on apple.com. And whenever I leave iTunes running overnight, at some point it starts sucking up memory and forces swap space to consume all available disk within 15-20 minutes. Note: it runs fine for hours, but at some point encounters an internal error (I'm usually asleep at the time) and eats up all available swap space.

Any clues, guys at Apple? Anybody else seeing this problem?

Or, anybody else having a "disk runs out of space but clears up after a reboot" problem that might actually be the same as my iTunes running beserk problem?

Here's the first few lines from my top output (I have a diagnostic script that starts collecting information as soon as disk availability drops below 97%):

Processes: 170 total, 3 running, 1 stuck, 166 sleeping, 955 threads

2013/09/05 05:41:17

Load Avg: 0.35, 0.35, 0.39

CPU usage: 3.12% user, 20.31% sys, 76.56% idle

SharedLibs: 13M resident, 7244K data, 0B linkedit.

MemRegions: 93419 total, 4584M resident, 98M private, 931M shared.

PhysMem: 1238M wired, 3469M active, 3459M inactive, 8166M used, 24M free.

VM: 420G vsize, 1053M framework vsize, 246499(0) pageins, 10436943(0) pageouts.

Swap: 40G + 3608K free.

Purgeable: 45M 42898(0) pages purged.

Networks: packets: 2995692/1743M in, 2975099/1356M out.

Disks: 459910/8943M read, 1039690/56G written.

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #WQ #PORTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VPRVT VSIZE PGRP PPID STATE UID FAULTS COW MSGSENT MSGRECV SYSBSD SYSMACH CSW PAGEINS KPRVT KSHRD USER

1696 iTunes 0.0 27:55.39 30 1 470+ 43442+ 2499M+ 105M+ 360M+ 42G+ 45G+ 1696 300 sleeping 501 11164522+ 4343+ 314685+ 94024+ 1697191+ 978976+ 525801+ 564+ 102M+ 33M+ dmac

Starting a week ago, my hard disk keeps filling up over a 15 minute period