MacOS – Startup disk has no more space available for application memory

macosmemorystartupvirtual-memory

I purchased a new Macbook Pro (8,3) last April, and have been using it heavily for xcode development, and little else.

This morning a message popped up:

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

It then suggests closing applications and removing files from my startup disk.

I presume this means virtual memory, however my disk has 600.26 GB available, according to Finder. I do have a time machine backup disk attached to the computer as well, but it has 664 GB available.

What does this message mean when there is certainly plenty of disk space remaining on the primary hard drive?

I have 8GB of RAM, a 750GB hard drive, and am running OS X 10.6.8. If any of the other system info is pertinent, let me know.

Best Answer

I've seen that message in programs like Photoshop that have their own virtual memory systems rather than just assuming the OS can handle RAM and memory allocation.

A reboot should clear things up. (safe mode boot might be nice if you want to run a full disk repair pass and then reboot normally)

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MacOS – Why does Finder use 59GB of swap space

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.

MacOS – get back more disk space when I restart the Macbook on Mountain Lion 10.8.3

When the OS is low on memory it creates a file called a swap file, aka virtual memory on your hard drive, and in OS X this starts at some amount (I think 64 MB) then double as needed. So if you have 8 GB of RAM, you could end up with an 8 GB swap file. This is then deleted when you reboot.

You can read about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging

Where the files are located and how to disable it: http://osxdaily.com/2010/10/08/mac-virtual-memory-swap/

Best Answer

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