Drive filling with something -- what?

larry98765

larry98765

Registered
Hi All,

Lately, after using my mac for a while, my hard drive will start to whirr incessantly and I can watch the free space on my drive slowly dwindle.

Shutting down then restarting seems to fix it -- the drive space comes back and the whirring stops.

If I was optimistic I'd guess that OSX has a defragmentation feature that's simply using that space to reorganize fragmented files.

If I was pessimistic I'd guess that I'm got some sort of malicious virus.

Anyone have any ideas? Is my glass half empty or half full?
 
My guess is that you're using some poorly written software that is leaking memory and that you don't have much memory to start with. Thus, your system is paging to disk and the drive is filling up with swap files (located in /var/vm).

OS X does not have a defragmentation feature.

It still could be a virus, but it sure sounds like the typical virtual memory snafu situation described above.
 
Y Dobon,

Thanks for your thoughts. I have a gig of RAM, so I wouldn't say I don't have much memory to start with.

I do think FontAgent Pro has been acting a but fishy -- slowing down the system. I have A LOT of fonts, but only what I need turned on. But I wonder if this could have something to do with it?
 
Well, it sounds like you have ample RAM, even though you don't explain how you are using your system (e.g., running A|W Maya with all of the Office X apps open at the same time as Internet Exploder/Mozilla).

There's so much skankware out there that it could really be anything. You're probably the best person to diagnose what's wrong with your system, since you're the one that uses it and (I'm guessing) you're the one who loads software onto it.

If it were me, I'd just run 'top' and see what was chewing up system resources.

I can't say anything about FontAgent Pro since I've never used it myself.

Good luck.
 
open Terminal, it's in your Utilities folder, type "top" without the quotes.
 
Ah, cool. Thank you.

Now the trick is to figure if any of those processes shouldn't be running. Some are obvious: "Safari, Mail, Dock, etc." but some are cryptic to my new-to-Unix brain: "slpd, cupsd, nfsiod (x4)."

How can I discover the source of the processes? In other words, if it was installed with the system or otherwise?
 
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