Tiger on an old iBook G4 Chewing through HD space?

[BFedrec]

I'm running Tiger (with the latest software updates) on my old 12" iBook and in the last week it has started a LOVELY behavior of chewing through the 1.5-2GB free on the hard drive after it has been up and running for 5-20 minutes. The only recourse I've found is a reboot.

I think it's tied more to the browser than the OS, but I've tried using Firefox, Safari, and Opera with the same result. Anybody else seen this sort of behavior before?

 

[fergwad]

OS X routinely makes use of virtual memory, which explains your disappearing HD space. Those figures are par for the course, and my guess is that this behavior didn't start recently; rather, you just hadn't noticed it before when you had more than a GB or two available. You get the space back when you reboot because this clears the VM.

 

[DewGuy1999]

Check your Console log to see if you've got something that's generating runaway errors filing up the logs and taking space.

 

[BFedrec]

This is certainly a new behavior. I've been running at the same 1-2 gig free for a year or more (this is a 6 year old iBook G4... it's only got a 60gb HD), and could always go a week or two between reboots (and it was never because of space that I rebooted). This is 5-10 minutes of using any browser (and possibly iTunes, been trying to track what's open, and those are a large portion of what I'm doing on there) before I'm at zero available space and forced to reboot.

edit: BTW, I'm not saying that I don't think it's virtual memory taking up my space... just saying it is a new thing. I assume there's a new memory leak somewhere that's causing the paging space/virtual memory issues.

That console log check is a very good idea... been trying to remember where the best place to find that info was (was watching 'top' in the terminal for a while).

 

[DewGuy1999]

This is certainly a new behavior. I've been running at the same 1-2 gig free for a year or more (this is a 6 year old iBook G4... it's only got a 60gb HD), and could always go a week or two between reboots (and it was never because of space that I rebooted). This is 5-10 minutes of using any browser (and possibly iTunes, been trying to track what's open, and those are a large portion of what I'm doing on there) before I'm at zero available space and forced to reboot.

That console log check is a very good idea... been trying to remember where the best place to find that info was (was watching 'top' in the terminal for a while).

To get to the console log:

Go Applications
Go to Utilities
Double click Console
Click the Logs icon

There ya go...

 

[BFedrec]

Thanks, I actually knew where the console was once you mentioned it. I'm just in three versions of Winsows, a couple flavors of Unix, and OS X so much I hadn't processed back "that info is in the console". Alas I'm not seeing much... there is an aped error showing up regularly relating to the driver updater thing running as super user.... but that doesn't seem to be it.

Still researching. Thanks for the help!

 

[DewGuy1999]

Thanks, I actually knew where the console was once you mentioned it. I'm just in three versions of Winsows, a couple flavors of Unix, and OS X so much I hadn't processed back "that info is in the console". Alas I'm not seeing much... there is an aped error showing up regularly relating to the driver updater thing running as super user.... but that doesn't seem to be it.

Still researching. Thanks for the help!

Pertaining to virtual memory, when this happens are you getting an abnormal number of page in/outs? Also you could try running something like Disk Inventory X to see where the space may be going.

 

[BFedrec]

Not sure if it counts as "no luck" when removing a few services (Google Updater service from back when I had tried Picassa) and System Pref panes (Menu Calender Clock and a couple others) seems to help the behavior (haven't totally filled up the hard drive in a day or two)... but now the browsers all crash after loading a couple pages. I'm about at "save and re-install the OS" phase.

I haven't found that the page in/outs is spiking horribly BTW... though I'm not sure what a "normal" level would be.

 

[DewGuy1999]

I've heard that page-outs should be less than 20% of the number of page-ins.

 

[mkrishnan]

One other thing to look at is Spotlight. It's possible that your Spotlight index has gone errant, and rebuilding it might help. You might also seriously consider turning Spotlight off, if you don't use it much (and Dashboard, but for the different reason of conserving memory).

What I found, back when I was using Tiger on an iBook G4, was that the biggest issue was that Tiger just did not behave well generally, however, with that little free hard drive space. You should target more like 8-10+ GB of free space, to keep it happy, if at all possible.

However, with Spotlight disabled (if you google, you'll find guides for this), it might not matter so much.

 

[BFedrec]

Still haven't gotten above a gig of space available... but the system seems to be running again (browser's still crash more than they should, but I can at least use the machine for a while). Still going to do a clean reinstall of the OS and apps, but somewhere in the killing of service and rebuilding spotlight indexes the worst of the problems cleared up. Thanks for the suggestions!