Good Day Everyone, and thank you all for taking the time and energy to consider this most nefarious situation. I'm not a frequent poster as I find that many out there are far more skillful than I at solving gthe problems and I am incredibly grateful that we, the Mac Community, are so involved and willing to help each other. Thus please allow me to add my two bits:
I am running a Macbook Air 13" Late 2010 Model with 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo cpu and 4 gb of RAM. Reasonably saavy with all the assistance from everyone online. Suddenly this past Tuesday, Nov 26 I began receiving "Out of memory" warnings along with the dreaded spinning beach ball. No new software was installed recently and I have NOT YET upgraded to Mavericks due to all the issues we all have been reading about, especially the email stuff. That said, I have many friends who have and have not had any issues at all.
So Running ML 10.8.5, no new software installs, and suddenly awaken from sleep Tuesday Morning to a "Out of Memory" warning. Repaired Permissions in Disk Utility, Reparied Disk in Disk Utility, Rebuilt directory using Disk Warrior from a bootable external drive, plus a plethora of other software I like to use when issues arrise. Reset PRAM, booted into Safe Mode, same problem and then discovered that whenever I restarted magically 15.75 Gb appeared. Then within 1 hour and sometimes less it dropped to 350mb and the warning.
Restarted several times to verify that and since then have been searching for a solution. Just finished reading this thread and even though it is primarily related to Mavericks, based on what I have found I would bet it is an Apple ugrade of some sort because it is happening in ML as well.
One thing that did help was to quite _ip in Activity Monitor, which controlled printing, and suddenly I'm back up to 11 Gb. However I have made no changes to any print drivers or software in months. The only think was the latest OS update released last week which automatically installed. So go figure.
Thanks in advance for any ideas or suggestiong beyond what we have in the thread so far.
Best DaO