[DietProZac]

This is really strange... I have a 12" Aluminum Powerbook G4 running OS 10.3.6, about 2 years old, and the hard drive is magically filling itself up somehow. When I reboot it shows the correct amount of empty space that should be on my HD (about 4 gigs right now), but after an hour or so, even if I don't open any apps and just let it sit off a fresh boot, I get the "your hard drive is almost full" warning message. I'm tired of rebooting every couple of hours.

I'm worried that this might be an indication that my HD is corrupt or failing, but running the diagnostic disc turned up no problems. A NAV scan also showed it to be clean.

Does anyone know what could be causing this?

[Cheetah223]

Does it actually say your hard drive is almost full, or does it say memory? Memory would be referring to RAM, not the hard disk..Just a thought.

[tooki]

There's nothing wrong with the drive.

More likely, some program you use has a bug, and keeps using more and more RAM, till it all runs out, and then keeps taking more, forcing Mac OS to use the hard disk ("swap", "virtual memory"). Then it keeps using more, till the disk is full.

If you open Activity Monitor, you can see how much real RAM and how much virtual memory each application is using, and track down the rogue app.

tooki

[DietProZac]

thanks Tooki,

there is a process called "kernel_task" ID 0 that is taking up 664MB of virtual memory. Is that normal? Could that be from bittorrent? Safe to force quit?

[Cheetah223]

This may not be the safest way to do it, and it may be more unsafe or whatever on macs than on PC's, but when I go through my processes and see one that's hogging my CPU's power I'll force quit it, if it was something critical then windows will say I can't force it to quit, or it'll tell me that my machine's restarting due to an error. At worst i've crashed my computer, no data lost other than what I hadn't saved. So if you're really worried about it, you can tell it to die and it probably won't do too much damage. However, I strongly suggest against taking this advice because I'd feel like crap if I killed your machine.

[DietProZac]

already tried to kill it but it wouldn't die. It's still there, and my free space is still shrinking by about 200MB an hour, but the memory being used by the process isn't growing.

[chris v]

In the Finder, go to Go>Go to folder... and type private/var/vm and hit return.

This will show you the folder with the virtual memory swap files in it. They should equal the amt. of hard drive space you're losing.

The trick is to figure out what process is spawning all of the swap files.

[ChrisF]

I had this problem after I'd installed Sharepoints to configure a Windows shared folder. After a few hours, there was a 18GB log file. However, as others have mentioned, it sounds like it may be a memory leak causing lots of swap files since you say the space returns on a reboot.

[DietProZac]

There is definitely a memory leak somewhere, but I have quit every process possible without forcing a logout and it's still draining away. Is there no diagnostic tool that can take care of this? Would anything short of a HD formant and reinstalling the OS fix the problem?

[King_Rat]

You could try this:

1) Reboot (so that you have the 4GB free)
2) Open up a finder window and check the size of every item. You may want to take a screen shot (command-option-3) to remimber what they all are.
3) Wait an hour and recheck the size on everything. If it has gone up somewhare then you can open that folder and use the same method to track it down.

The big problem with this idea is that you would miss whatever it is if the problem is in an invisible folder. Anyway, I agree with the above people that it is a memory leak or a log file.

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by King_Rat:
3) Wait an hour and recheck the size on everything. If it has gone up somewhare then you can open that folder and use the same method to track it down.

Omni Disk Sweeper from Omnigroup will do this for you.