Macs - nuts!
 

My mac has been a bit more temperamental than normal recently.

Sometimes slowing and it has stopped a couple of times.

A message has popped up - Start up disk is running out of space

I have checked - I have 47gb of free space.

Now even a mac cannot use that much virtual memory.

Typically I have been working on presentations in Keynote of around 5-10mb, with email and Skype running and not much else.

Confused.com :confused:

and from the Terminal :

sudo -s /etc/daily
sudo -s /etc/weekly
sudo -s /etc/monthly

After the message appeared did you immediately check the disk space, or did you reboot then check it? A reboot will clear up various temp files and logs which could gobble disk space.

Typically the OS should only display that message when you have aprox 500MB or less free of the disk, certainly not when you have 47GB free.

Were you running Parallels at the time the message popped up? could be that it's created some large file, I seem to recall it does create large files for memory, thus it could have gobbled it and caused the OS to have a problem, then after it's quit the disk space comes back. Even still, I doubt it'd snaffle 40 odd gig of space.

The machine slowing down and stopping does sound as though something is hogging the processor, and possible the same thing is creating large temp files on the disk, and thus causing both the problems you're seeing. What you might want to do is keep Activity Monitor (It's in the Utilities folder within Applications) running, set it to display all processes and click the CPU % heading and make sure the little arrow points down, this will cause it to sort by CPU % and the items taking the most processor time will appear at the top, thus allowing you to easilly see what is eating the processor. You can also do a similar thing and sort on Virtual Memory, so you can see where the disk space is going too.

Thanks for the suggestions

I was not running Parallels at the time.

Markus I hear what you are saying - but realistically what the hell can create temp files to use up 47gb of disk! It's bonkers!

I would have to be cutting an HD version of Dances with Wolves to get even remotely close.

If it was Waterworld the computer would have just given up and died.

That Disk Inventory X app is pretty good. I downloaded the beta of the Universal one, efficiently shows where my disk space has gone. Well worth running it and having a look at the folder listing to see which folder is taking up all the space, then you can drill down until you find the exact location of the mother of all files and depending on what it is and where it's located, and of course it's name, we should be able to work out what the hell is causing the space to get gobbled up.

For example, on my machine I've got a 57GB Music folder, the next largest folder is my Users folder, which is 12.2GB. 7.8GB of that is in my Library folder, another 3.2GB is in the Documents folder. Out of the 7.8GB, the majority (6.1GB) of that is my Mail folder (which is about seven years worth of email). The caches folder is about 1GB, the other large chunk is in the Applications Support folder.

Obviously, something, somewhere is basically taking the pish and yumming big time on your disk space, we just need to nail what it is and then work out what to do to prevent it from happening again.

Did you try turning it upside down and shaking it ? ;) :D

Just before it 'fell' on the floor ;) :p