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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > Disk Full Alert: But Disk NOT FULL!

Disk Full Alert: But Disk NOT FULL!
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Thinine
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May 17, 2004, 02:53 AM
 


I just got this warning for the first time. And I have over 100 MB of disk space left. And no applications became unstable or crashed. I've had my disk completely full before (Finder windows show 0MB available) and have never received this warning. It did keep popping up while I was watching a movie in QuickTime, which was really annoying. It's strange, though, that it specifically said it ran out of space for application memory and not just space for data. I wonder how this error is activated.
     
dtriska
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May 17, 2004, 03:17 AM
 
You do not want your system drive to fill up like that. Bad stuff will happen.

I imagine application memory refers to virtual memory.
     
wataru
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May 17, 2004, 03:41 AM
 
100MB is not enough. Swap will easily eat several times that amount. I would never want to be running an OS X system with less than 1GB of free space available.
     
thePurpleGiant
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May 17, 2004, 05:29 AM
 
This refers to the fact that OS X uses virtual memory all the time (swap files) when it runs out of real RAM. These swap files will get larger and larger the more programs you open (assuming you don't have much RAM - under 512mb or so). You really do need to keep more Hard disk space free to allow for this. 100Mb is cutting it pretty fine.
     
Telusman
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May 17, 2004, 07:43 AM
 
If you've only got 100mb of disk space left your disk is effectively full. There might be 100mb of free space left but if i recall correctly the system will *not* fragment a swap file, therefore your 100mb could be 100000kb chunks or 100 1mb chunks that the system cannot write a swap file to.

As for how it's activated, easy, the system tried to create a new swap file for applications to be paged too and found that there wasn't enough contiguous space to allocate to such a file, hence the error. This is the time when preferences become corrupted and can't be written to disk....

More space is going to be an asset for you.

- Telusman


Originally posted by Thinine:


I just got this warning for the first time. And I have over 100 MB of disk space left. And no applications became unstable or crashed. I've had my disk completely full before (Finder windows show 0MB available) and have never received this warning. It did keep popping up while I was watching a movie in QuickTime, which was really annoying. It's strange, though, that it specifically said it ran out of space for application memory and not just space for data. I wonder how this error is activated.
"No ma'am i'm not angry at you, I'm angry at the cruel twist of fate that directed your call to my extension..."
     
ul1984
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May 17, 2004, 08:01 AM
 
Originally posted by Thinine:
It's strange, though, that it specifically said it ran out of space for application memory and not just space for data. I wonder how this error is activated. [/B]
i think that the swap system has reached the high water trigger, which means there is less than wanted free space in the swap files, so it will try to create a new swapfile to create more free swap space. i think this is when this window will pop up.

and yea, letting the hard disk go this full is really bad, 2 reasons besides the swap space i can think of:
1. if you never let the free space go below about 10%, it will really help minimize fragmentation.
2. you may lose preferences, if disk space reaches zero
     
mishap
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May 17, 2004, 08:04 AM
 
Yes you need at least a few extra gigs of HD space.... i have 2GB of swap files right now with 1.25 GB of memory
     
SMacTech
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May 17, 2004, 08:40 AM
 
I would be curious to see exactly how much virtual memory BitTorrent is taking up. You may want to go look into those files you are downloading. Might they be large movie files or something?
     
fisherKing
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May 17, 2004, 09:05 AM
 
Originally posted by SMacTech:
I would be curious to see exactly how much virtual memory BitTorrent is taking up. You may want to go look into those files you are downloading. Might they be large movie files or something?

i was surprised to see that mLdonkey files were saved as fullsize, BEFORE they were downloaded, so that my hard drive was filling up really fast (ie multiple "potential" copies of large files)

definately check the bittorrent stuff, and back up some files and clear some memory!
"At first, there was Nothing. Then Nothing inverted itself and became Something.
And that is what you all are: inverted Nothings...with potential" (Sun Ra)
     
SMacTech
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May 17, 2004, 09:34 AM
 
Originally posted by fisherKing:
i was surprised to see that mLdonkey files were saved as fullsize, BEFORE they were downloaded, so that my hard drive was filling up really fast (ie multiple "potential" copies of large files)

definately check the bittorrent stuff, and back up some files and clear some memory!
I learned about that the hard way. With BT, when trying to downloading a 600mb file, even if you don't receive a single bit, it takes 600mb of space on your drive.
     
ul1984
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May 17, 2004, 10:54 AM
 
Originally posted by SMacTech:
I would be curious to see exactly how much virtual memory BitTorrent is taking up. You may want to go look into those files you are downloading. Might they be large movie files or something?
i dont think BitTorrent in itself takes up that much swap space, but since it creates a lots of disk IO, large parts of the systems physical memory will be eaten up by disk cache.
Over time unused applications and shared libraries will get swapped out in favor of the disk cache, and that will take up swap space, but not that much.
     
Thinine  (op)
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May 17, 2004, 11:21 AM
 
BitTorrent only allocates HD space as the file is being downloaded now, so it's not that. Funny thing is though, that BT continued downloading like nothing was happening. And I've had BT stop downloading before when the disk was actually full (0 MB available). I know I should have more space free, but I'm on an iBook with a 10 GB drive.

The only reason I posted this was that 1) I'd never received it before, even on an actually full disk, and 2) the disk wasn't really full, which I though was strange.
     
ul1984
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May 17, 2004, 12:08 PM
 
Originally posted by Thinine:
the disk wasn't really full, which I though was strange.
this might be the reason it couldnt create the swapfile even if you had a bit over 100MB disk space free, OSX now creates swapfiles with these sizes, so if you already had swapfile0-3 for example, it would need 512MB to create swapfile4
Code:
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M 10 May 05:03 swapfile0 -rw------T 1 root wheel 64M 10 May 07:13 swapfile1 -rw------T 1 root wheel 128M 10 May 07:30 swapfile2 -rw------T 1 root wheel 256M 11 May 02:46 swapfile3 -rw------T 1 root wheel 512M 15 May 16:34 swapfile4
     
stuffedmonkey
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May 17, 2004, 04:44 PM
 
I add my voice to the above chorus of posts - that letting your disk run below about 5% free can seriously hose up your OS. But there are some easy ways to get space back for "free". Go to versiontracker and getyourself a freeware called "delocalizer" it will delete all kinds of non-english language files, even if you have chosen not to install the in in the beginning, there will still be several hundred megs wort to delete.
     
diamondsw
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May 17, 2004, 04:57 PM
 
Does anyone else find it odd that Apple would design such an ugly alert, complete with multiple exclamation points on the title? If I saw that I'd think some trojan horse had been installed on my machine.

A general rule of thumb is keep at least 10% of a drive empty, and at least 1GB on whatever drive holds your swap files (on OS X, almost always your boot drive).
     
CatOne
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May 17, 2004, 07:09 PM
 
Originally posted by diamondsw:
Does anyone else find it odd that Apple would design such an ugly alert, complete with multiple exclamation points on the title? If I saw that I'd think some trojan horse had been installed on my machine.

A general rule of thumb is keep at least 10% of a drive empty, and at least 1GB on whatever drive holds your swap files (on OS X, almost always your boot drive).
Well...

It's not that ugly. You shouldn't see that alert often, and it is a VERY serious alert. All sorts of bad stuff is imminent in this situation.
     
ginoledesma
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May 17, 2004, 08:17 PM
 
Originally posted by Thinine:
BitTorrent only allocates HD space as the file is being downloaded now, so it's not that. Funny thing is though, that BT continued downloading like nothing was happening. And I've had BT stop downloading before when the disk was actually full (0 MB available). I know I should have more space free, but I'm on an iBook with a 10 GB drive.
Older versions of Bittorrent used the preallocation scheme. The application would preallocate the target file size and then write chunks of the file into their proper positions. More recent versions use a dynamic writing scheme, which increases the file size as more chunks are downloaded. This was similar to the case of Virtual PC's virtual disk image: in the older versions, you had to create a fixed size, now it can be resized dynamically.
     
bradoesch
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May 17, 2004, 08:54 PM
 
I have problems when I run my drive less than 1.5 GB or so. Preferences fail to stick, and Mail gets buggered.
     
Johnny B
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Aug 14, 2007, 03:30 PM
 
I agree that having 500kb available means you have basically nothing. But I'm getting the Startup disk full warning asking me to force quit applications and here is my situation:

G4 with 2-3 aps running. I've got a 120gb HD with 66 GB available. My trash is empty. It's got 1.5 GB of SDram and a 2mb L3 cache.

Any clue what's going on?...or how to tell someone who is not computer saavy how to fix this?http://forums.macnn.com/images/smili...l/confused.gif
     
rickey939
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Aug 14, 2007, 05:15 PM
 
Zombie thread.
     
Cadaver
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Aug 14, 2007, 09:35 PM
 
^^^^^
Hey, nice baseballs there, Rickey (sounds kinda weird, actually).
     
rickey939
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Aug 14, 2007, 09:49 PM
 
Originally Posted by Cadaver View Post
^^^^^
Hey, nice baseballs there, Rickey (sounds kinda weird, actually).
Thank you.
     
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Aug 14, 2007, 09:56 PM
 
Our zombie reviver has been notified of his error.

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