disk-spacemacos
The kernel_task process is at 567MB of RAM, and my hard disk space keeps disappearing. I just synced an iPhone 4S with iTunes like ~2 days ago, and now every couple hours I get the message that the startup disk is low on space. I've tried using Grand Perspective to no avail, as well as Disk Doctor.
What might be consuming my space or causing these results?
Nobody will tell you for sure (without diagnosing a problem), but you should definitely check both your harddrive and memory (corrupted memory may cause data loss while writing to HD. I had such a problem twice in my life.)
I prefere non-OS specific utilities:
Red means bad
Official site of this utility is dead, but you can find in here. That's what you need to check your hard disk drive. I'm not sure that it will work on Apple hardware, but you can plug your hard drive in any PC or in external USB enclosure and check there.
I believe this is a bug in OS X 10.7. I also have a retina MacBook Pro. Mine is 2.6/16/512, and I noticed that there were 0 page outs but a very large swap file being created (mine was about 8 GB). Closing applications actively reduced the swap space being used. Again there were no page outs being recorded.
I believe this has to do with the sleep image file that also gets housed alongside the virtual memory files in /private/var/vm. When pmset hibernatemode is set to 3 (default for laptops, suspend to RAM and disk), sleepimage gets written upon sleep. This is why it takes a few moments for these laptops to go to sleep: it's writing up to 16 GB of RAM to the sleepimage.
However, changing this setting so that the RAM gets powered on sleep and NO sleepimage is written has resulted in no abnormal increases in swap file size. My suspicion is that the sleepimage is in some cases being preserved post-sleep and prompting the creation of swap files. Perhaps it is this incorrect behavior that is also resulting in the unusually large swap file sizes you are seeing.
From the manpage for pmset, to change to NO suspend to disk you would run in a Terminal:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
To delete the sleepimage (and reclaim 16 GB on your computer with 16 GB of RAM), run:
sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage
I restart after these operations just to ensure there's no weirdness. On each power source, you can check the status with:
pmset -g
You should be aware that, in the event of a total power loss (battery dies and not plugged in) the contents of the RAM will not have been saved to the hard drive, and you will lose your work. For me, this is a small but calculated risk because the speed of sleep/wake, coupled with the great battery life and reclaimed storage space. Additionally, for me it seems to have mitigated this issue, which I have not seen on any other Mac laptop I've owned. I wish we had those battery indicator lights, though.
Best Answer
My guess is you have a stuck process that is impairing the ability of the OS to tell you what amount of space is actually used from Applications, audio-movies-photo rather than categorizing everything as "other".
Boot to safe mode - hold the shift key as soon as you hear the startup chime and release it 20 seconds after the grey screen is drawn.
That should free up a stuck process and also repair any disk corruption at is easily fixable. Please let us know if you continue to get bad information from the space allocation image. Surely Applications take up more than zero K.