Mystery Virtual memory/disk usage

I have installed SL on a Mac Mini and MBP with no problem. But now I have installed it on a Macbook and something is eating the disk and/or virtual memory.
After a fresh reboot I have 120G free disk space. This steadily reduces until the OS starts popping up the force quit dialog saying that I am out of application memory. Quitting applications has minimal effect and soon I am forced to reboot. At which point I am back to 120G of free disk space.
I have had a look at it with activity monitor as well as top and there are no real standouts in terms of of real memory or virtual memory. Perhaps it is something crashing over and over again, but there is nothing in /cores.
Any suggestions on how I can track this down?

Hi Andrew and welcome to the forums
Any suggestions on how I can track this down?
In the Finder, do command-f and when that search window opens, set to search your mac & set filters (add/+) to show all visible and hidden files over a certain size, say 1 or 2 gb or larger....it may take a couple tries depending on max file sizes that legitimately sit on your drive, etc. - see what shows up and go from there. Good luck in any case.

Similar Messages

Activity Monitor shows virtual memory usage is way too high

35 Gb of virtual memory for Safari, Mail, iTunes, Activity Monitor and all running processes!
Why these numbers are so high compared to Tiger? Can someone please explain? Is it a bug or something or is it the new way introduced with Leopard?
RAM and CPU usage looks fine though but this VM usage seems too high to me. I will run out of disk space after a couple of days of runtime. And the Adobe Creative Suite is not even running. Jeez...
Message was edited by: flec65

Thanks for the hint Niel.
The /private/var/vm folder is actually only 64 Mb. I can calm myself now...
(via Go menu in the Finder, select Go to Folder and type /private/var/vm to access it)
But why is Activity Monitor behaving like this in Leopard?

Mac OS X hard disk memory discrepancies, virtual memory culprit?

Recently my iMac (2.4 ghz intel core 2 duo, 4 GB ram, 320 GB HD running Snow Leopard 10.6.5 ) has started acting really weird. Mainly, the hard drive space has reached almost zero for no apparent reason. I've added up the volumes of the four files on my drive (Applications, Users, Library, and System) and come up with a sum of only 123.94 GB taken up. I've also scanned my drive using OmniDiskSweeper and Disk Inventory X (the two programs recommended to me via colleagues and tech support) and came up with a similar result (give or take a gigabyte). Eventually i checked the Activity monitor, and found to my surprise that a whopping ~135 GB was being used for virtual memory purposes. The virtual memory usage was read right after startup with no background programs running. Currently my drive only has 4 to 5 GB of free space on it, and that's after deleting certain unnecessary programs and files. i've tried rebooting my mac several times, but to no avail, and the trash bin is empty. I don't even have space on my hard disk to burn a DVD through iDVD anymore, and i need that capability for my job. Is virtual memory the culprit behind these problems? What can i do to fix this?

Eventually i checked the Activity monitor, and found to my surprise that a whopping ~135 GB was being used for virtual memory purposes.
This is misleading.
Is virtual memory the culprit behind these problems?
No. The actual problem is most likely excessively large items in /private/var/log/ and/or /Volumes/; the Finder's Go to Folder command can be used to navigate to both. You may also want to check the actual VM swap space in /private/var/vm/, but shouldn't delete anything in there.
(55251)

High disk usage/high memory usage.

i keep getting high memory usage and high disk usage in ps cs6.
its slow when i open a file. how can i solve this problem.
thank you.
philip.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but more than what? More RAM is almost always better, but you haven't answered most of the questions posed here. The answer might be different if you have 2 GB of RAM or 32 GB of RAM already. A 9 megapixel document could get rather large with a lot of layers, but again you've neglected to give any hard info about its size.
Regarding your video card, that's a bit of a judgment call you need to make. For Photoshop CS6 I currently advise people to try to get a video card that gets a score of 1000 or better on this benchmark: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
Video card speed will matter when you're editing those 3D components and video card VRAM will also matter, but possibly even more importantly your GeForce 320 is a bit old, and nVidia may just not be doing their best driver work for it any more.
Everything in general will run more smoothly with a powerful modern video card. I like to recommend a VisionTek ATI Radeon HD 7750 - or if the computer power supply and your budget allow, the even more powerful 7850. VisionTek does a very good job with their hardware, IMO, and it comes with a lifetime guarantee.
Keep in mind that if you switch from nVidia to ATI or vice versa, you should carefully sweep your system to ensure all files from the old card are removed, then visit the web site of the new card's maker and download/install their latest display driver release.
Best of luck.
-Noel

High Virtual memory usage when using Pages 2.0.2

Hey there,
I was just wondering whether there had been any other reports of unusually high memory usage when using Pages 2.0.2, specifically Virtual memory. I am running iWork 06 on the Mac listed below and Pages has been running really slowly recently. I checked the Activity Monitor and Pages is using hardly any Physical memory but loads of Virtual memory (so much so that the Page outs are almost as high as the Page ins (roughly 51500 page ins / 51000 page outs).
Any known problems, solutions or comments for this problem? Thanks in advance

I don't know if this is specifically what you're seeing, but all Cocoa applications, such as Pages, have an effectively infinite Undo. If you have any document that you've been working on for a long time without closing, that could be responsible for a large amount of memory usage.
While it's good practice to save on a regular basis, if you're making large amounts of changes it's also a good idea to close and reopen your document every once in awhile, simply to clear the undo. I've heard of some people seeing sluggish behavior after working on a document for several days, which cleared up when the document was closed and reopened.
Titanium PowerBook Mac OS X (10.4.8)

System memory vs disk usage -- why is my hard drive almost full if my system memory is half empty?

I have a white Macbook, 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of memory, Mac OS X, version 10.5.8, purchased in 2008. My Mac keeps warning me that my startup disk is almost full, and indeed Activity Monitor shows that my disk usage has minimal free space (2.31 GB). However, the System Memory tab shows that half my space is free.
Does the discrepancy mean that there is lots of space left on my Mac? If not, how can I identify if some sort of error is filling up my memory? Right now, I have a lot of music and documents stored on my laptop, but nothing else, and I would like to be sure it's those two things that are filling up the space.
What is the recommended method for adding more memory to my Mac, if nothing else?

There are two different types of memory in your Mac. There is system memory, more commonly referred to as RAM, and there is disk space. RAM is where the Mac works on data. Disk space is where data is stored for long term storage.
You are in serious danger of causing your Mac to die completely by running it with so little free space on your system drive. It is imperative that you start either deleting or move data off the disk drive. You should have 8 to 10 time as much free space at least at all times for OS X to run will.
A tool that can with cleaning up your disk drive is OmniDiskSweeper. It will tell you the files and fol,der that are using the most space. That will give you good candidates for deletion or movement.
Allan

What are Microsoft- or other's-best practice or recommendation of Disk usage, CPU usage, memory usage monitoring to prevent system trouble ?

We use win2003,win2008,win2012 servers.
I heard somewhere that Microsoft recommendation threshold of disk usage monitoring is ( free disk space >= 15- 20 %) , if I remember correctly, but how about CPU usage and memory usage monitoring ?
What are Microsoft- or other's-best practice or recommendation of Disk usage, CPU usage, memory usage monitoring to prevent system trouble and improve availability ?

Hi,
You can refer the following Performance Tuning Guidelines,
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2003
http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/8/0/2800a518-7ac6-4aac-bd85-74d2c52e1ec6/tuning.doc
Performance Tuning Guidelines for Windows Server 2008 R2
http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2010/08/27/performance-tuning-guidelines-for-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx
WINDOWS SERVER 2012 - PERFORMANCE TUNING GUIDELINES
http://blogs.technet.com/b/itprocol/archive/2012/11/27/windows-server-2012-performance-tuning-guidelines.aspx
Hope this helps.
We
are trying to better understand customer views on social support experience, so your participation in this
interview project would be greatly appreciated if you have time.
Thanks for helping make community forums a great place.

How to reduce page faults (virtual memory) usage in LabVIEW

I am running LabVIEW 2010 on Windows Embedded Standard system 4G (3G usable) of RAM.
The program (executable running on the Run-Time Engine) continuously samples from a USB-6251 at 1MS/sec (2 channels @ 500K) and scans the data stream for anomalous events, which are recorded to file. The system is intended to run 24/7 for at least 2 months, and although everything is working fine (6% CPU, no memory leaks), it generates 6000 Page Faults / second. I am concerned that I will kill the hard-drive at this rate, over long periods of time. There is plenty of RAM available (LabVIEW is only using 200K, and there is over 2G free), but the program is choosing to rely on Virtual Memory instead.
Is there a way to force (coerce) a LabVIEW application to consume more RAM and less VM?
The code is heavy (2 independent routines to collect and process the data stream through a shared double buffer, lots of in-obvious logic...), but I will post if it would help to answer the question.

Craig Akers wrote:
I am running LabVIEW 2010 on Windows Embedded Standard system 4G (3G usable) of RAM.
The program (executable running on the Run-Time Engine) continuously samples from a USB-6251 at 1MS/sec (2 channels @ 500K) and scans the data stream for anomalous events, which are recorded to file. The system is intended to run 24/7 for at least 2 months, and although everything is working fine (6% CPU, no memory leaks), it generates 6000 Page Faults / second. I am concerned that I will kill the hard-drive at this rate, over long periods of time. There is plenty of RAM available (LabVIEW is only using 200K, and there is over 2G free), but the program is choosing to rely on Virtual Memory instead.
Is there a way to force (coerce) a LabVIEW application to consume more RAM and less VM?
The code is heavy (2 independent routines to collect and process the data stream through a shared double buffer, lots of in-obvious logic...), but I will post if it would help to answer the question.
IIRC, the decision to move a page of memory from physical memory to disk is made at the OS level. There probably isn't any setting you can change in LabVIEW to change this behavior.
Keep in mind that not every page fault results in a page being loaded from disk. If your program (or the LabVIEW run-time) is frequently allocating and freeing memory, you could get a lot of soft page faults as the physical memory pages are repeatedly allocated to your process and returned to the OS. If you're only running at 6% CPU, this wouldn't be a problem.
You could try disabling the page file altogether, if the machine has enough RAM, but I wouldn't do this unless you actually have a performance (or hard-disk durability) problem. Having a page file to back up the physical memory is the difference between your program suffering from degraded performance vs. simply crashing if the machine runs out of physical memory.
Mark Moss
Electrical Validation Engineer
GHSP

Mem usage vs Virtual Memory Size

Hi Gents!
I have java server application and it has strange behaviour in memory management after one day of uptime. Windows Task Manages shows me Mem Usage=136m, Peak Mem Usage=342m, VM Size=557m. And Java Visual VM shows Heap Size=160m, PermGen=32m.
Do anyone have ideas how to deallocate Virtual Memory to decrease it size?
JVM parameters:
-Xms32m
-Xmx192m
-Xss128k
-Xincgc
-agentlib:hprof=cpu=samples
-XX:+AggressiveOpts
-XX:+DisableExplicitGC
-XX:ParallelGCThreads=4
-XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
-XX:+UseParNewGC
-XX:SurvivorRatio=16
-XX:TargetSurvivorRatio=90
-XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=31
-XX:MinHeapFreeRatio=20
-XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio=25
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
-Dsun.rmi.dgc.client.gcInterval=990000
-Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=990000
-javaagent:./lib/sizeofag.jar

Is it a multi-threaded application? How many user threads?

100% disk usage in Task Manager when using Photoshop CC (Windows 8.1 - 64 bit)

Hi
I have been using Adobe CC for a month or two now. I own an Asus laptop with Intel i7 (2.4 GHz), 6 GB RAM, 1 TB hard disk space and 64 bit, nearly 6 months old. Following apps are currently installed: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Audition, Acrobat XI Pro, Premiere Pro and Media Encoder. I recently performed an update through Adobe CC for Photoshop and Illustrator, all others are up-to-date.
I believe, but I may be wrong, that since this update Photoshop is acting weird on my laptop. When I start Photoshop, my task manager immediately indicates a 100% rate of my disk usage. This seems to wield off after it is fully operational, but when I start to edit a file, the disk usage immediately jumps back to 100%, while the CPU remains below 10%, RAM stays at 3.5-3.8 GB (only 60% of total capacity) and even the actual read and write speeds of my HDD are not particularly high (5 - 10MB max). And because of the 100% disk usage, Photoshop freezes in an instant and operating it is nearly impossible.
I already uninstalled Photoshop, went over all services and **** that could trigger this within Windows 8.1 (Google-search for: Windows 8.1 disk usage 100%) , re-installed Photoshop and I still have the same problem.
So, I was wondering if there might be a solution to this problem or if anybody else is having this problem as well?
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: This error applies only when I try to manipulate, add, edit or remove text. All other functions (not related to text) seem to work properly.

No, I don't know much about that, but I found a couple links for you..
"service host: Local system (network restricted)(11)" eating virtual memory
http://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1b496x/windows_8_high_disk_usage_usually_arou nd_100_and/

100% disk usage 20 minutes after logon

After logging on several users in our environment experience 100% disk usage for up to 20 minutes.
OS: Win 8.1
I tried the following:
Disabling Superfetch, Windows Update services and other services that might cause the issue.
Manually configuring Virtual Memory and paging file
Applying updates
Disabling antivirus
Analyzing with Procmon - unable to see root cause.
Also ran chkdsk.
Any tips would be appreciated.

Karimselm
YOu may be able to get more detail by running a windows performance recorder trace. Instructions for which are in the below wiki. Since the problem appears on boot (And I assume no other time) you should use the boot configuration. Save
any open data as it will reboot automatically. Upload the trace to onedrive or any file sharing service and put a link to it in you next post
In order to diagnose your problem we need to run Windows performance toolkit the instructions for which can be found in this
wiki
If you have any questions feel free to ask
Wanikiya and Dyami--Team Zigzag

What's up with my Virtual Memory?

I've got a MacBook Pro 15" 2Ghz Core i7 running the 10.8.4 with all updates and 16gb of ram. I notice a couple of odd things over the course of a multiday session:
- Over a few days of usage launching and quiting most apps but with Mail, Terminal, LaunchBar and Safari running constantly, memory and virtual memory usage grow to the point where I have only a few dozen Mb of ram left and over 12 Gb of Virtual Memory consumed.
- Odder still is never, ever, in any session regardless how long, do my virtual memory statistics show more than 14 hits, not 14%, 14 all during boot time, despite hundreds of thousand of page-ins and lookups, and millions (22 million + this session) page faults.
I've noticed that Safari is the main culprit with memory consumption as it only frees up the bulk of any used if quit and relaunched. Even closing all tabs and windows has little to no affect on memory or virtual memory usage, but I have no idea why lookups once the machine is booted never, ever result in a hit despite a constantly growing number and size of swapfiles. Its almost as if Lion is encrypting the swaps but then doesn't have access to read them though I don't know how that might come about.
Anyone care to offer suggestions as to cause or debugging/troubleshooting tips?
Other notes:
This has been happening at least since 10.7.x.
Aside from apps listed above, other frequent apps are, Adobe Photoshop 5.5.x, Lightroom 5, LaunchBar, and ocassional MS Office 2011 with all updates.
Thanks,
David

About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory & determine how much RAM is used
Memory Management in Mac OS X
Performance Guidelines- Memory Management in Mac OS X
A detailed look at memory usage in OS X
Memory Usage Performance Guidelines- About the Virtual Memory System
Understanding top output in the Terminal
The amount of available RAM for applications is the sum of Free RAM and Inactive RAM. This will change as applications are opened and closed or change from active to inactive status. The Swap figure represents an estimate of the total amount of swap space required for VM if used, but does not necessarily indicate the actual size of the existing swap file. If you are really in need of more RAM that would be indicated by how frequently the system uses VM. If you open the Terminal and run the top command at the prompt you will find information reported on Pageins () and Pageouts (). Pageouts () is the important figure. If the value in the parentheses is 0 (zero) then OS X is not making instantaneous use of VM which means you have adequate physical RAM for the system with the applications you have loaded. If the figure in parentheses is running positive and your hard drive is constantly being used (thrashing) then you need more physical RAM.
Adding RAM only makes it possible to run more programs concurrently. It doesn't speed up the computer nor make games run faster. What it can do is prevent the system from having to use disk-based VM when it runs out of RAM because you are trying to run too many applications concurrently or using applications that are extremely RAM dependent. It will improve the performance of applications that run mostly in RAM or when loading programs.

How to increase virtual memory 10.5.8 imac?

I have 180 GB free on the hard disk.
Processes: 107 total, 2 running, 2 stuck, 103 sleeping... 430 threads                                                      16:31:59
Load Avg: 0.48, 0.51, 0.55    CPU usage: 7.36% user, 14.34% sys, 78.29% idle
SharedLibs: num =   12, resident =   37M code, 768K data, 3320K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 62876, resident = 444M +   14M private, 158M shared.
PhysMem: 195M wired, 522M active, 117M inactive, 835M used, 189M free.
VM: 12G + 389M   5668464(2) pageins, 3301833(0) pageouts
thanks

I remember increasing virtual memory with my Power Machintosh 6500; just to play The Sims! Before Apple killed Mac OS 9, virtual memory modification used to be a feature. So now I guess they either feel we have enough RAM or they have provided dynamic vRAM.
You may be able to test the fact Niel provided, by punching in this line of code in terminal, when you've maxed out your RAM:
sysctl vm.swapusage

The server is running low on virtual memory.

When running a sheet in discoverer I am getting the following error after around 10 mins
The server is running low on virtual memory. This can happen due to insufficient disk space or heap space on the server. Please contact your Discoverer Administrator for assistance.
I have changed the following settings to
maxvirtualdiskmem = 4096000000
maxvirtualheapmem = 4096000000
The query returns 625500 records with parameters selected
and 834360 records without any parameters set
Can anyone help

Memory usage is going to depend on several things. While rows returned is part of it, other things like sorts, calculations, page items and report type can have a huge impact. Out of curiosity, is the report a crosstab? are there a lot of sorts, of some complex calculations?
How many users are accessing Disco at the same time, and is there anything else on the same box as Disco?
Also, after you changed the settings (and I am assuming the change was made to pref.txt), did you run applypreferences.sh and then bounce the app server? If not, the changes have not taken place.

Why does my mac use virtual memory when I still have free physical memory?

I have a 2011 i7 quad core mac, I was hoping it would scream. Most of the time it does. However when trying to edit within FCPX I get a very disappointing experience with many pauses and pin wheels if I don't close every single other program.
I have 8GB of physical memory and when i'm experiencing these problems I see that i still have 1-2 gb of physical memory free or inactive. At the same time FCPX is only using 2gb of memory. I just happened to keep an eye on the VM page in/outs and noticed them going up.
Right now i'm doing some browsing and emailing, that's about it.. its sat with over 4gb of memory free or inactive and yet still the page in/outs is still going up occasionally. It's currently at over 2 million page ins, and over 1 million page outs.
So with so much physical memory free why is this happening!? At the moment the mac feels nice and responsive, but if i start trying to use FCPX i'll start to experience these slowdowns, stalls... whenever i see these i see my main hdd is being accessed whilst the pinwheel is displayed.. I mean i get it, its VM, the hdd is too full, a bit fragmented perhaps, its stalling... but i've got gigs of memory sitting free or inactive... why wont the OS use it!!!
Would my experience improve if i took the plunge and got 16gb of memory instead of 8gb!?
Thanks for your help!

Because without virtual memory, managing computer RAM is a royal pain in the ...
Virtual memory cost you nothing, and gains you huge benefits, even if you do not notice it
What cost you is when you need more real RAM than is available, and things are thown out of RAM, either back to the original file it came from (Read Only information), or pushed out to the swapfiles (/var/vm/*). Then the system has to wait for slower disk access. But even this is better than not being able to run the apps until you quit something else.
(speaking as someone that starting his professional life working with 1" punch paper tape, 80 columns cards, 7-track and 9-track mag tapes, 1MB disks (you heard me right 1 Megabyte), etc..., and trust me when I tell you that virtual memory is a god send to software development).
There are a lot of problems running a modern operating system with out virtual memory. For example all the shared libraries and frameworks that provide services to an application would all need to be compiled into the application, which means every application gets bigger and instead of having a single copy of the shared library or framework, you would have dozens of copies wasting your RAM.
Without virtual memory, you would be required to find a contiguous chunk of RAM to run your application. Think of this like going out to dinner by yourself, you can find any available table, but if you go to dinner with your extended family, you need a table for 10 to 15, and if you are going to dinner with your high school graduation class, you will need hundreds of seats all next to each other and a very large table. In the later situations you have to wait until the resturante has enough contiguous space, which means you have to wait until other diners finish. There may be lots of empty tables, but they are not together, and your group wants/needs to sit together. Virtual memory allows gathering any 4K chunk of RAM, building a virtual memory map for all those random 4K chunks, and make it look like one big contiguous chunk of RAM, so you can run your application right away, no waiting.
Going back to shared libraries and frameworks. This code will need to have addresses resolved so they branch to the correct locations during execution, and it will need to have addresses resolved on where its program variables are located in RAM. Using virtual memory, you can local a shared object into RAM, then place it in everyone's virtual memory map at the exact same RAM address. This means everyone can use the exact same code, and since everyone is using it at the same RAM address, it makes life so much easier for the operating system (translation, less work, less wasted CPU time, faster execution).
When a program wants to grow, for example a web browser loading a web page (and its images) into RAM, it needs to allocate additional RAM. In the contiguous RAM model, you need to get control of the RAM that imediately following your program, but if that RAM is being used by someone else, you have to wait until that program goes away.
Virtual memory provides protection from another program looking at and modifying your program's RAM. Malware would just love for virtual memory to go away.
You want virtual memory. What you do not want is excessive paging activity.
If you are concerned, then you can launch Applicaitons -> Utilities -> Terminal. Once you have a terminal command prompt, enter the following command:
sar -g 60 100
which will tell you the number of 4k pages written to /var/vm/pagefile ever minute for 100 minutes (modify the numbers to suit your tastes). You can then go about your normal usage, and come back later to see how much you have been using the pagefiles. If you have mostly zeros, and an occasional small burst, this is noise, and not worth worrying about. If you have sustained pageout activity, with higher numbers, then you should either consider running less things all at the same time, or looking for an application that is being greedy with its memory use (or has a memory leak), OR get more RAM for your Mac if you need to do all those things at once.
But do not complain about virtual memory. Life would be much worse without it. Then again if you have a better idea, write a research paper, and get operating system vendors (as well as hardware vendors) to implement your ideas. I am serious, as I've seen many accepted computing ideas be overturned by good new ideas.

Mystery Virtual memory/disk usage

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