"Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory" error?

External drives need to be formatted to Mac OS Extended to work with large files.

Is your formatting correct?

Al

Which OS are you using?

The profile indicates 10.7.4

Al

Alchroma, in System Information it says, "Mac OS X 10.7.5 (11G63b)" Not sure why the forums here read me as using 10.7.4

Look in your original post.

Your Profile reads 10.7.4.

This and other details are what each user manually adds to describe their machines etc.

Knowing this info often helps with determining issues such as exports.

There are newer versions of FCPX and OS available than your existing ones.

Back yo your export problem, it could be a corrupt render file, try deleting the renders.

Al

You probably already know that this MBA has relatively marginal specs for FCP X. So you should give it every processing advantage possible – like keeping your projects and events on the external drive.

Why this project is having problems, while previous ones didn't, is hard to say. But the fact is that with all the swaps that AM is reporting, the system's resources are clearly being strained up to and beyond its limits. Try moving the project and its event off the SSD an to the external and see whether it then can complete the export.

Russ

I've tried the following:

• Freeing up more hard drive space - I've anywhere from 25 GB to 107 GB free and it does not seem to matter how much free space I have, I still get the error
• Repairing system drive - I've repaired permissions with Disk Utility and I've even performed a drive Rebuild using DiskWarrior
• Cleaning up FCPX project - I've gone through and deleted all unused media, deleted project and event render files, etc
• Cleared RAM - During export I've repeatedly ran MemoryKeeper to clear RAM and free up more memory
• System restart before attempting the export and I also boot up holding 'shift' which blocks unnecessary background tasks, dropbox, etc from starting

Activity Monitor during export:

• The only processes that are taking up any considerable memory are FCPX and kernal_task
• '% CPU' on FCPX jumps around from 60% or less to 250% or more
• FCPX usually has 83 threads
• 'Real Memory' for FCPX can be anywhere from 300 MB to 2 GB
• It seems that when the export is at about 25% or 30% that is when the computer starts slowing down, 'Free' system memory goes down to mere megabytes, and a ton of swapfiles start to generate in .../var/vm folder which will build up until I'm out of disk space
• Sometimes the error will pop up even before I run out of disk space due to the swapfiles. Last time it came up when I still had 40 GB free

Like Russ said, your system specs are pretty marginal - especially the 4GB of RAM. As you are experiencing this sometimes gets rapidly depleted, so the system starts to use swap on the system drive - the internal SSD. You have written about freeing hard drive space - do you mean in the external? You really need room in the internal SSD: not for your export, but for system stuff like sleepimage, swap space etc. The error message is pretty clear: you reached a situation where there is not enough space in the SSD for your system to work properly.

There is clearly something very wrong here. 59GB of swap use is a monstruosity.

I am guessing that some weird corruption occurred on this one project, or one of the media files used in it.

One thing to try: create a completely new project, and copy and paste everything from the problematic project into the new one. Try exporting the new one. What happens?

threeoten wrote:

... using FCPX 10.0.8.

those memory-leak problems were solved with actual vers FCPX 10.1.

update. done.

If you're in the midths of a project and don't dare to update yet:

while exporting, control via Activity monitor your swap file size.

when it gets critical, launch Terminal and type

purge

hit <enter>

I used then when FCPX.08 was around an underpowered MacMini; that purge-trick solved the mem-leak problem..

as mentioned: just update (it's free...) ...