Approx. every 2nd month, my Mac (MacOS 10.13.1) goes crazy. System eats up all memory:
I am not sure where the space is used. Most probably for Spotlight. But I am not sure. Checking the directory sizes in the terminal didn't help. The used space seems to be nowhere.
After approx. 2 days, the system space starts to go down till after approx. 3 days, everything is normal again.
Any advice?
MacBook Pro TouchBar and Touch ID, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3)
One possible cause for excessive disk use is Time Machine local snapshots.
Try this in the Terminal
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
For example, in my mac right now I see two snapshots:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-04-02-103838
com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-04-02-120330
If you see a lot of snapshots, that may be the cause.
You can delete some snapshots, or use the thinlocalsnapshots verb to gain back some amount of space, e.g.
sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 10000000000 4
enter your password (nothing will show as you type), and press enter.
In the command above, 4 is the "urgency" and 10000000000 amounts to roughly 10GB; you can change this to a larger or smaller value.
One possible cause for excessive disk use is Time Machine local snapshots.
Try this in the Terminal
tmutil listlocalsnapshots /
For example, in my mac right now I see two snapshots:
com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-04-02-103838
com.apple.TimeMachine.2018-04-02-120330
If you see a lot of snapshots, that may be the cause.
You can delete some snapshots, or use the thinlocalsnapshots verb to gain back some amount of space, e.g.
sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 10000000000 4
enter your password (nothing will show as you type), and press enter.
In the command above, 4 is the "urgency" and 10000000000 amounts to roughly 10GB; you can change this to a larger or smaller value.
Time Machine is not enabled on my machine -> cannot be the reason.
System temporarily uses all disk space
