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Your Mac OS X Startup Disk has no more space available for application memory?

What burns me is this problem of slowing down to a crawl and freezing up because of something called "memory leaks" which nobody at Apple seems to be able to eliminate with any new iteration of the OS X?


Can you maybe try to explain this in layman's terms to someone who is a graphic artist/designer and not an IT tech?


Suggestions for more RAM are easy for those who can actually add more RAM, but my iMac is maxed out at 6Gigs, so tell me why my Adobe Creative Suite CS3 worked for the past few years without issues as had my HP Color LaserJet 2600n? Now that I've "upgraded" the OS X my machine is slowing up to a snails pace compared to 3 years ago. And I went into the printer drivers section and I was told I don't have permission to delete drivers for odd-ball printers that I don't have?


So for those that need the information:


I'm running OS X v.10.8.4 (12E55)


2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo


Memory is 6 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM


Boot ROM Version:IM71.007A.B03
SMC Version (system):1.21f4



Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256 MB


Primary HDD is 500 GB with 182.77 GB free


<Edited By Host>

Airport Express-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.8), iMac, MacBookPro, iPad, iPhones

Posted on Sep 9, 2013 4:02 PM

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2 replies

Sep 9, 2013 5:59 PM in response to LightningMike

Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.


When you notice the swap activity, open the Activity Monitor application and select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select

View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory

from the menu bar.

If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more real memory over time without ever releasing it. Here is an example of how it's done.


The process named "Safari Web Content" renders web pages for Safari and other applications. It uses a lot of memory and may leak if certain Safari extensions or third-party web plugins are installed. Consider it a prime suspect.

If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.

The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command:

sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total

where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.

Your Mac OS X Startup Disk has no more space available for application memory?

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