MacOS – OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory

macosmemoryspaces

I am running a simulation that deliberately uses a lot of memory. In fact, more than the available RAM and so the program should use swap space. However, after 60 GB of swap space are used, I get the following complaint from OS X 10.8.4:

OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory

At this stage the RAM is fully used and virtual memory is used up to ~60 GBm as well as the swap, which Activity Monitor reports is around 60 GB.

I tried this program on two different Macs with the same outcome and the same critical amount of swap where everything goes wrong.

My machine:

  • Mac Pro
  • Two quad core 2.7 GHz processors
  • 32 GB of RAM
  • 1.3 TB of free hard-disk space

I checked my handcoded C++ program for leaks using Xcode and I understand where the RAM usage is coming from.

I would be glad if anybody has a suggestion what the root of my problem is.

Best Answer

Absolutely run sysdiagnose the next time you run out of disk space so that you can find out which processes are leaking memory (and/or just using all that RAM). As the commenter above stated on the question - this is clearly something amiss with one or more programs and not something that should happen routinely.

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