Temporary Disk Space

Question

Temporary Disk Space

My Macbook HD has about 16.5GB free disk space. When booting up El Capitan, this space gets quick reduced and the entire system slows down... and comes to a standstill.

The HD space gets reduced to about 120MB and the Mail programme locks up. I cannot open anything. Now, the HD is up to 11GB free disk space, which is the reason why I am able to write this post via Safari browser. What is happening here? Normally (i.e., with El Capitan as that wasn't an issue with Yosemite or Maverick) the disk space goes up to 13GB or 14GB. Now, it sits at 11GB. Why does El Capitan actually need to temporarily fill up the HD with 15+GB data (or whatever it does) in the first 10 mins., so that the entire system freezes up? What to do about it?

Cheers,

Fred

MacBook Pro

Posted on Oct 10, 2015 1:05 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 10, 2015 3:05 AM in response to Fred_from_Germany

I guess I found the problem, but I wouldn't know what to do about it though:

In the Activity Monitor, I see that "Mail" is using lots of memory and I start the program pretty much first thing. It uses 13+GB memory and everything freezes up for a long time...... it now only uses 146MB and the free disk space is back to 18.8GB. I don't know why Mail is pumping up the space needed and it didn't happen in previous OS X versions. But this seems to be the issue.

Why this happens and what to do about it? I'm not sure....

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Answer 2

R C-R

Level 6

17,794 points

Oct 10, 2015 3:23 AM in response to Fred_from_Germany

It sounds like you might be confusing free disk space with memory use. If you click on "About this Mac" on the Apple menu & chick the Storage tab in the window that pops up, what does it say is the free space on your startup drive (usually named "Macintosh HD")?

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Answer 3

Oct 10, 2015 3:34 AM in response to R C-R

Hello there,

I just checked the "Storage" tap - didn't know that I could find the HD storage space there. It now says "18.57GB free". I originally checked the bottom information of the Finder tap, when selecting the Macintosh HD. Right at the bottom of the finder window, it now says "18.7GB available".

The two places I looked are:

1) Finder window, Macintosh HD, bottom information line. That shows the free disk space and it corresponds with the "storage" tap of "About this Mac". The free disk space drops down to 120MB when initially opening the Mail programme.

2) The memory usage in "Activity Monitor" (selecting the "Memory" tap). It typically reads 120-170MB memory for the Mail application. When the Mac is about to freeze up, the memory usage of Mail is about 15GB.

1) and 2) happen at the same time and it seems that Mail needs tons of buffer in terms of memory and hard disk usage. When closing the Mail programme (forcing to quit in the Activity Monitor), the Mac gets back to its normal memory usage and the hard disk gets back the free disk space (anything from 13-18GB). This happens at the same time, when opening Mail or shutting it down.

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