Panther journaling taking up 2-3GB?!

[cb911]

i've been wary of journaling in Panther, but since i stuffed OS X with a Quake 3 theme i've had to re-install, so i've left journaling on (for now...)

the other day i noticed that on my Panther partiton (which is 8GB) i had 2.5GB free, or round about that. then about an hour later i only had about 300MB, then withing the next hour i was getting hard disk full warnings? what's going on? i'm guessing it's because of Panther because i've never had that problem before...

also, just before i rebooted now i noticed i had 2GB free on my OS X partition, then after a reboot, i've got 3GB free?

if this keeps up i'm going to have to disable journaling.:rolleyes: does anyone know if this is normal behavior? or if it is even journaling causing this?

thanks for your help. :)

[JFreak]

osx makes a 80MB swap file every time when you run out of virtual memory. these files are cleaned in a boot. you should consider buying more ram if that becomes a big issue for you...

[cb911]

thanks. that might be the problem. i've only got 512MB RAM now... but i'm getting another 1GB soon. hopefully that will solve the problem.:)

[cnr1089]

This isn't clearly a Memory issue. I think 512MB of ram is plenty (the more the better) and shouldn't cause 2 GB of page files. Something is leaking. Launch Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/) and sort the list by "Virtual Memory" what is the top app? If you see something with more then 512MB of ram, that could be the problem.

Also, sort by "Real Memory". Anything over 100 MB of RAM could be suspect.

[jevel]

Hmm... I´m experiencing the same symptoms as the starter of this thread, and if I take a look at virtual memory usage, I have about ten apps using 133MB and up. It starts with the dock, @ 133MB, then the Terminal @ 150MB and upwards until FireBird @ 400MB. Is this normal numbers?

Today I´ve "lost" 4GB disk(!).

-KJ

[scem0]

Those numbers seem really high to me, shouldnt all the decimals be about on space the the left?

Seems like the dock should take no more that 13.3, terminal 15.0, and firebird at 40.0.

Those seem very high to me.

scem0

[Nermal]

Open up Terminal and type

ls -l /var/vm

Add up the file sizes, and that'll be how much is being used for virtual memory.

[jevel]

Thanks for your suggestion!

Here´s the output:

$ ls -lh /var/vm/
total 131072
drwx--x--x 10 root wheel 340B 25 Dec 03:15 app_profile
-rw------T 1 root wheel 64M 4 Jan 20:40 swapfile0

So it´s not the swapfile that´s my problem. As I´m writing this, I´ve rebooted, and I´m still losing disk. Down 300MB from last time I posted... 1.92GB left! This is kind of annoying!

-KJ

[cb911]

sounds like a strange problem you've got there...

i think i'm okay now. i haven't been losing space so rapidly now.

although the other day i did have a 1.5GB swap file (total swap file space). i saw that by clicking on the MenuMeters in the top menu bar...

[Masempith]

Having similar problem of Hard disk space loss. though I am unsure whether it is due to journaling or not.
I understand why the VM is used-more memory is needed, but 512 megs (apple installed RAM) should be enougn to run Panther.
I also understand the VM goes *should go away when restarting as it often does, but on Apple support forums many people attribute this loss to Safari and memory leaks-not true. I haven't run Safari and it still happens.
To what cnr1089 said, kernel_task (no idea what this is) uses over 560megs (VM) and 50 real megs. Seems bad to me.
One last thing, why can swap files not be given back to the system from the RAM when they are not needed? Why does on ly a restart put them back? Anyone know?
This problem sounds like an OS isse to me, but I am not an expert, maybe Apple might notice if we made a video of the troubles and posted on the internet -just kidding, would never do that.
But willing to listen to others if they wish to help.