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I have no memory left and I forget why.

mentaluproar

mentaluproar

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 25, 2010
1,858
320
Ohio, USA
So I leave my iMac running all the time for boinc, locking it and blanking the screen whenever I leave. Just now, I come across this mess when I unlocked it.

Well, that's special. I didn't think to capture the activity monitor info until after I closed just about everything.
 

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You're not out of RAM at that point, instead you're out of space on your hard drive/SSD. Might want to check how much free space you have.

I've had the same happen a couple of times, though in my case it was iFlicks getting stuck on a file causing the drive to fill up with temporary data until there was no free space left.
 
HDD For Sure

Dark Dragoon said:
You're not out of RAM at that point, instead you're out of space on your hard drive/SSD. Might want to check how much free space you have.

I've had the same happen a couple of times, though in my case it was iFlicks getting stuck on a file causing the drive to fill up with temporary data until there was no free space left.
Click to expand...

You might want to check some of that startup stuff too.
 
Dark Dragoon said:
You're not out of RAM at that point, instead you're out of space on your hard drive/SSD. Might want to check how much free space you have.
Click to expand...

No, take a good look at both of the attached pictures. 58.52GB swap is used, and the dialog is pointing out that the disk is too full for more swap. It is not your standard "drive is full" and "poster doesn't know the difference between HD and RAM" thread, some process got really crazy and chewed up lots and lots of memory.

I'd qualify 58.52GB of swap use as "out of RAM" on a system with 4GiB of physical RAM.
 
mentaluproar said:
So I leave my iMac running all the time for boinc, locking it and blanking the screen whenever I leave. Just now, I come across this mess when I unlocked it.

Well, that's special. I didn't think to capture the activity monitor info until after I closed just about everything.
Click to expand...
First, restart your Mac to free up swap file space. Then free up some hard drive space by deleting or moving files. After the restart, monitor the System Memory tab at the bottom of Activity Monitor to see if you have excessive "page outs" under normal use, a sign that you may benefit from more RAM.
 
No way I'm out of space. It's a 1 Tb hard drive and several months ago, I moved all my media to an external drive. I have TONS of free space left!
 
I think the OP is more sharing the curiosity than requesting help resolving it. That's and insane amount of swap to devote to a process.

I don't know if I'm more happy to see the OS will allow something to request as much memory as it needs or sad for the fact that what was most likely a memory leak or other app bug was allowed to fill up the box by going unchecked.

Did it really fill up the boot volume with the swap file or was the message just confused?
 
mentaluproar said:
No way I'm out of space. It's a 1 Tb hard drive and several months ago, I moved all my media to an external drive. I have TONS of free space left!
Click to expand...

Ok was just checking as, the runaway process on my machine swallowed up around 1.3TB of free space (1.5TB drive). Before I ended it and the space was freed.

I'd say it would be unlikely for the swap on it's own to fill up the boot volume.
 
mentaluproar said:
No way I'm out of space. It's a 1 Tb hard drive and several months ago, I moved all my media to an external drive. I have TONS of free space left!
Click to expand...

Just curious, how much is "TONS"?

mentaluproar said:
I don't think it's the HP device monitor. I tried launching it to see what it does and nothing came up. Odd,
Click to expand...

Short of digging through the log files, your best bet is to just wait for it to happen again and check the activity monitor before closing everything then. :p
 
Here is a screenshot of my system at idle (as idle as I let it get). Note the internal hard drive free space now that we have a server in the house.
 

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mentaluproar said:
Here is a screenshot of my system at idle (as idle as I let it get). Note the internal hard drive free space now that we have a server in the house.
Click to expand...

As idls as you let it get and you are spending 99 percent of your cpu in user time?

Something's chewing up cpu bad ... what is it?
 
You have excessive page outs and huge amount of swap data which leads to excessive HDD usage as well. My guess: Memory leak on one of your apps. Check the activity monitor (be sure to monitor all processes) and see which app is using so much RAM.

Check also your BOINC prefs for how much RAM/Swap/HDD space it may use.
 
mape2k said:
You have excessive page outs and huge amount of swap data which leads to excessive HDD usage as well. My guess: Memory leak on one of your apps. Check the activity monitor (be sure to monitor all processes) and see which app is using so much RAM.

Check also your BOINC prefs for how much RAM/Swap/HDD space it may use.
Click to expand...

When I checked the activity monitor, nothing was using gobs of ram, yet there was intense swap usage.

BOINC is set for defaults for ram and HDD usage. I only upped the processor usage and put a trigger for it to turn off if I use 10% or more of the CPU (which it gleefully ignores, requiring me to kill the tasks.)

I hadnt used transmission for awhile. I wonder if there is another memory leak in transmission. By the time I got to it and saw the error, the torrent was finished, so it could be storing unfinished torrent data in the swap instead. I think I read somewhere that initially, transmission had trouble with lion memory management, but that it was resolved with an update.
 
mentaluproar said:
When I checked the activity monitor, nothing was using gobs of ram, yet there was intense swap usage.

BOINC is set for defaults for ram and HDD usage. I only upped the processor usage and put a trigger for it to turn off if I use 10% or more of the CPU (which it gleefully ignores, requiring me to kill the tasks.)

I hadnt used transmission for awhile. I wonder if there is another memory leak in transmission. By the time I got to it and saw the error, the torrent was finished, so it could be storing unfinished torrent data in the swap instead. I think I read somewhere that initially, transmission had trouble with lion memory management, but that it was resolved with an update.
Click to expand...

If this is Lion, I have seen issues where Lion will not release memory after an application is terminated. It does this on mine forcong me to reboot the machine from time to time. Just another bug that Apple has yet to address.
 
mentaluproar said:
I don't think it's the HP device monitor.
Click to expand...

Why not? If you have it installed, it seems likely that that is exactly your problem. Was the process running at the time?

There are lots of reports about the HP device monitor taking up huge amounts of swap space:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3341813?start=0&tstart=0
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1089419/
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2725318?start=30&tstart=0
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Mac-printing-and-scanning/hp-device-monitor/td-p/937647
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15966202#15966202
 
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your page outs are off the charts... that's ridiculous. you need to turn off your computer more often, or upgrade RAM, although with that many it might not help... how long do you leave your computer on without turning it off?
 
GuitarG20 said:
you need to turn off your computer more often
Click to expand...

There shouldn't be a need for that. He just needs to dramatically lower the swap usage by figuring out what process is responsible for using up all that space and quit it. Lion will then automatically delete any unneeded swap files.

After about a week of usage, I have almost 5GB of page outs (with 8 gigs of RAM), but only 50MB of Swap currently used.
 
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