Disk Space Disappearing

[shieldyoureyes]

I'm in a bit of a predicament. I woke up this morning, so see that my powerbook was out of disk space. I thought it was strange, since last time I checked (about 1 day before) I had about 6GB left and I hadn't downloaded anything since. I thought nothing of it, deleted all my unnessesary files I had laying around and cleared up around 11GB of space.

I've been gone all day, and when I come home about 12 hours later I have no disk space left again. The problem is I don't have much I can delete. I've got my music, photos, documents, and apps left.

Does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? I'm watching my acticity monitor and it seems like I am downloading and sending, even though I have no applications open that would be accessing the internet. Sounds like a freakin' windows virus going on...

 

[shieldyoureyes]

ok, this is bizarre. I just deleted about 100 MB of podcasts, emptyed my trash (yes, I made sure it was empty before...like 10 times I checked) and now I have my ~11GB back.

I ran the application What Size and found this huge file located in

Hard Disk -> Private -> var -> log -> windowserver_last.log

It is 4.75 GB. Anyone know if this is a normal file to have laying around?

EDIT: I just googled about the windowserver_last.log and found its a pretty common problem. Trying some of the suggestions now. If anyone has any ideas, still feel free to share!

Oh, and i can see my disk space disappearing. Back down to 8GB in 15 minutes.

 

[shieldyoureyes]

Well crap. I just deleted windowserver_last.log and windowserver.log and within 3 seconds, windowserver.log was back and already up to 15 MB.

This is going to get really annoying real quick.

EDIT: Its already up to 200MB again. I'm quiting different apps and checking it, but no luck so far. Also, WindowServer is using between 30-40% of my CPU.

I guess I need to find the root of this problem and get it solved. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[mad jew]

Did you restart after deleting the log?

 

[shieldyoureyes]

yeah, and the log just came back.

However, I just disabled a bunch of unnecessary start up items, rebooted, and the logs are no longer growing. Its nice to be back up to having 20GB free.

I'm going to let it run all night and see if it happens again.

 

[mad jew]

Okay, cool. What startup items did you disable?