Hard disk keeps filling up

[yus0f]

Good morning.

Im a mac user but not totally techy. About a week ago, my hard disk keeps on filling up. i had a scenario once that i only have 1GB left of disk space when suddenly an error popped up saying "You dont have enough disk space" while streaming anime. I checked my disk space and it said 23mb left. i wondered how it happened. i checked out some threads with the same problem like this one https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/864202/ and i followed the fixes there. but it didn't really fix the problem, disk space still keeps on filling up. now i went to my /private folder and have 4 folders there, a folder named "var" is 5.68gb, inside var is another folder named "vm" and its 4.36 GB and inside vm is the sleepimage which is 4.36gb. i checked activity monitor while im streaming anime and noticed that the shockwave player in firefox is going 1.07gb and continues to go up.

please help me, ive erased some files already and i have 8gb space. but keeps on dropping. i hope you can give me some fixes. thanks

mike

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space​

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

• Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
• For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.
  OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs
• Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
  
  
• Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
• Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
• Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:

• Encrypted drive
• Time Machine backup files and needed disk repair
• App filling log file
• App or file was 89GB
• Drive needed to be re-indexed
• Time Machine backup file
• Large app cache file
• Garageband files and video podcasts
• Oversized email being duplicated
• Another email issue

 

[yus0f]

im sorry, im using 10.6.4

and ive also noticed that the folder "var" in the /private is gaining size. i mean the size of the folder continously goes up. inside var folder is a subfolder named "vm", inside vm is the sleepimage file, then "swapfile00" "swapfile01" and keeps on gaining size. i dont know why these swapfile files are eating my disk space.

i tried to restart the pc and when it came up, i checked the VM folder, only sleepimage file is there. and the disk space is back to the real size.

 

[GGJstudios]

im sorry, im using 10.6.4

and ive also noticed that the folder "var" in the /private is gaining size. i mean the size of the folder continously goes up. inside var folder is a subfolder named "vm", inside vm is the sleepimage file, then "swapfile00" "swapfile01" and keeps on gaining size. i dont know why these swapfile files are eating my disk space.

i tried to restart the pc and when it came up, i checked the VM folder, only sleepimage file is there. and the disk space is back to the real size.

That's because you're exceeding your RAM and paging to disk. Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Also, click on the System Memory tab at the bottom. Then take a screen shot, scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot and post them.

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[Ccrew]

im sorry, im using 10.6.4

Why 10.6.4? A reason you haven't gone to 10.6.8?