Possible Memory Leak... Real problem. Please Help

Question

Hello,
About a couple of months ago I started getting a little concerned with my MacBook Pro's Hard Drive space, I deleted a bunch of stuff, after noticing I only had less than 1 Gb left, then I purchased an external HD and have used it to back up, and also to remove stuff from my hard drive in the computer. But now, I have noticed a problem that rather concerns me, If I put my computer to sleep after a normal day of work, and usage, when I wake it up it seems fine, and it runs about the same (a little less efficient, but not too much) then I realize that I am missing about 1-2 Gbs in Hard Drive Space. If I restart the computer, That memory comes back... and then If I keep using the computer, it leaks memory little by little.
I have tried running anti-viruses and spyware software but that does not seem to work against this issue, unless I am doing something wrong. I have also tried to update all my software and keep my processes and running applications to a minimum. Finally, I tried leaving the computer on... without doing anything, connected to the internet... It leaked some more memory. I did the same, but without the internet... and then it did not leak anymore. I have no clue how this happen or how to fix it. I have tried most of the things I know could have possibly helped, but seems like isolating the problem to the internet does not really help me, since I need it for work.
I would appreciate any suggestions or help, Thanks!!

Answer 1

You are describing the natural process of virtual memory and Apple's use of a sleep image. Look in /var/vm for these files. It is not uncommon to have a sleep image of a couple of GB. Think about it. You have a computer that has data on a hard drive. When you start up the machine, that data needs to move from the hard drive to RAM and then, in some cases, back to the hard drive as virtual memory. This is when you do not have enough physical RAM to hold everything you are doing. Now, what happens when the machine goes to sleep? Well, you have data in RAM that in most cases will remain there as long as there is power. On a laptop, it is possible for the contents of RAM to be written to a file in the event of a battery depletion. THis is the suspended hibernation feature that Apple has. Commonly, there is one swapfile and one sleepimage file located in /var/vm.
If you are missing a lot of space, you might instead want to check out your log files. It is possible that something caused a high number of log entries to be recorded and you have an incredibly large log file. Also, if your machine is not running between 3 and 4 a.m., you are missing the default maintenance scripts that run and rotate log files. Look in /var/log for unusually large logs.
Hope this helps.