[trusted_content]

I generally leave about 1.5 gb free on my main partition... I know that's "cutting it close" but the rest of my partitions are full, too, so until I get a new HD, that's the way things are going to be.

I'll watch as after only 2h of running, swap space encroaches upon the disk until there's 94 mb (!!!) remaining, at which point ALL OF MY PREFERENCES GET TRASHED.

Now the memory leak is one issue.

But why does OS X trash all of your preferences when disk space gets low? Is there any logical explanation for this before? It's happened to me three times now and it's just not cool.

[theory]

OK. I dont know exactly what you are mean
by trashing your prefrences but I think
what might be happening is that there you
can write to disk so the prefrences are
not saved.

Just something to think about Imagine if instead of running out of disk space you
would run out of vm but your prefrences
would be intact. Will that be a better
solution ? I don't think so

[Developer]

Originally posted by trusted_content:
But why does OS X trash all of your preferences when disk space gets low? Is there any logical explanation for this before? It's happened to me three times now and it's just not cool.

This is by design. CoreFoundation (which CFPreferences is a part of) is designed without error checking. If something goes wrong (like disk full) - tough luck. But in normal operation it is slightly faster.