[Flyzone]

Something strange has been happening lately with 10.3.
I divided the HD into 2 partitions (10 and 70 Gb) and installed Panther on the smallest one.
My iTunes and iPhoto libraries are on the second partition. On the smallest partition I have almost 3Gb of space available but lately I’m running out of space in a matter of hours. At the beginning I thought it was due to a scratched disk set up in illustrator or photoshop but changing that didn’t really solve the problem.
After 20 minutes that I’m running Safari (1.2), iTunes and entourage, the space available on the HD is already down by about 1.5 Gb and only a restart gives me back the lost space.

Am I missing something here?

fly

[Maflynn]

Virtual Memory,
Panther takes what it needs to swap stuff out of memory. A reboot cleans that off.

Mike

[[APi]TheMan]

Check what's going on in your /var/vm:

Code:
[aorth@Alan-Orths-Computer: ~]$ ls -lh /var/vm/
total 64M
drwx--x--x    8 root     wheel         272 Feb  8 14:39 app_profile
-rw------T    1 root     wheel         64M Feb  8 14:38 swapfile0

I have had some situations where I had 5 - 10 swapfiles, each at 64 megs, this can start to take up riduculous amounts of disk space. Sometimes applications have memory leaks that cause them to eat up RAM to no end like a runaway train... how much physical RAM does your system have?

[Flyzone]

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
Check what's going on in your /var/vm:

Code:
[aorth@Alan-Orths-Computer: ~]$ ls -lh /var/vm/
total 64M
drwx--x--x    8 root     wheel         272 Feb  8 14:39 app_profile
-rw------T    1 root     wheel         64M Feb  8 14:38 swapfile0

I have had some situations where I had 5 - 10 swapfiles, each at 64 megs, this can start to take up riduculous amounts of disk space. Sometimes applications have memory leaks that cause them to eat up RAM to no end like a runaway train... how much physical RAM does your system have?

here's the result from the terminal

Flyzone-Computer:~ flyzone$ ls -lh /var/vm/
total 2097152
drwx--x--x 10 root wheel 340B 3 Feb 00:12 app_profile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M 7 Feb 16:31 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M 7 Feb 17:32 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 128M 7 Feb 17:38 swapfile2
-rw------T 1 root wheel 256M 8 Feb 10:37 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 512M 8 Feb 11:01 swapfile4

Lots of space is taken by swapfiles and I don't know what application is creating them. BTW I have 512Mb of Ram

Fly

[Moonray]

When it's about swapfiles, 10.3 is more greedy than its predecessors. Safari, iTunes and Entourage shouldn't be responsible though, but any applications for example that will buffer large amounts of data can push it up, or those who "leak memory". If you rarely reboot your Mac and have a lot of applications running, a size of 2 MB is not unrealistic. Some space might be released if you quit as many applications as possible. But if this is really getting a problem for you, you can put some stuff on the other partition you have.

-

[Art Vandelay]

I haven't used Entourage for about a year or more but it used to have a nasty memory leak. It's possible it still does.

[tooki]

Originally posted by Flyzone:
here's the result from the terminal

Flyzone-Computer:~ flyzone$ ls -lh /var/vm/
total 2097152
drwx--x--x 10 root wheel 340B 3 Feb 00:12 app_profile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M 7 Feb 16:31 swapfile0
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M 7 Feb 17:32 swapfile1
-rw------T 1 root wheel 128M 7 Feb 17:38 swapfile2
-rw------T 1 root wheel 256M 8 Feb 10:37 swapfile3
-rw------T 1 root wheel 512M 8 Feb 11:01 swapfile4

Lots of space is taken by swapfiles and I don't know what application is creating them. BTW I have 512Mb of Ram

Fly

It's not one application that's creating them -- it's the operating system doing it, as needed.

512MB is, IMHO, the bare minimum for running OS X. With more than just one or two small apps running, you're going to get appreciable swapping.

I also have to say that you really, really, really should consider backing everything up and reformatting as one single partition. You gain nothing except a hard time from partitioning, and putting OS X on the small partition is extremely unwise, since so many things (unnecessarily, I might add) demand to be installed or run on the boot partition.

tooki

[barbarian]

I agree that putting X on a small partition is a mistake, but I disagree with the partitioning advice.

Here are several reasons one might want to partition.

1. If you have multiple users on machine and you all share the same music/photo libraries, partitioning greatly simplifies sharing libraries between users (otherwise you have to put libs on the shared library which, at least here, was a nightmare of user permissions problems... especially in iphoto.

2. It is always good to have a totally clean copy of the system on a 2nd partition in case of emergency. Also this is a good place to keep key disk utilities like Disk Warrior and Data Rescue X.

3. If you use OS 9 infrequently you might want to take 9 completely off your main partition to simplify directory structure.

4. If you use radically different environments at home and work sometimes it is just easier to have a different system on a 2nd partition customized for the 2nd environment.

5. In case of system corruption it is always good to have somewhere to boot from.

[Appleman]

What's the difference between #2 and #5?

[Ω]

One was labeled 2 and the other 5!

[Appleman]

Originally posted by _?_:
One was labeled 2 and the other 5!

[Maflynn]

When I was going to reformat and reload Panther, I looked into creating two partitions, a small one for the OS and a larger user partition.

What I found was the steps needed to do so were more involoved and some apps wouldn't except a home directory that wasn't on the same drive as the OS, I think MS office was one of them.

My orginal idea was to have a seperate user partition so when I do upgrades I just reformat the OS partition but after looking at itm, the odds of pulling off that type of brain surgey weren't good - i figured I'd mess somthing up so might as well stay with what works.

Mike