(sigh) Hal, as I said, I followed all the steps you laid out and it solved the problem -- at least, at the time. I turned the indexing back on and then went to dinner. When I came back, I did the measurements and got the stuff below.

As you'll see, the Spotlight file is 2.5 GB (on a 75GB drive with 31.5 GB available -- the number is going down again) and the /private/var/vm/ is now 2.3 GB. So, while I now know how to recover the space, I don't know what is causing those files to grow so quickly and how to stop that cancerous growth.

I suppose I could automate the cleanup, but I don't know how to stop it. Any ideas on that?


R-Brashears-MacBook:~ rkbrashear$ IFS=$'\n'; for f in /Volumes /.Spotlight* /.Trashes /Library/Logs /private/\
> {var/{log,spool,db,vm,tmp},tmp} /Temp*; do sudo du -hsx $f; done; IFS=$' \t\n' 36K /Volumes
2.5G /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
14M /Library/Logs
5.0M /private/var/log
476K /private/var/spool
290M /private/var/db
2.3G /private/var/vm
9.9M /private/var/tmp
336K /private/tmp
du: /Temp*: No such file or directory
R-Brashears-MacBook:~ rkbrashear$

As I said last night, everything was cleaned up, but then disk space started disappearing again with Spotlight leading the way. So, this morning I repeated the steps you outlined (except that I have not turned indexing back on (most recent results can be found below). As you can see, the Spotlight file is now small (hey, no indexing at all), but the /private/var/vm file still seems excessive.

I am considering doing a doing a clean install of Leopard, that is, wipe the disk, do the install and then restore apps/docs from latest backup. I'm thinking of doing this because, while I can clean things up, obviously something is going on in the background that recreates these massive files. Not only do the files grow quickly to eat up the available disk space, but whatever is going on slows the computer so much as to be almost useless.

Or maybe before doing that I should turn on indexing again and then watch activity monitor to see what processes are running.

What do you think?




Last login: Mon Nov 5 07:15:04 on ttys000
R-Brashears-MacBook:~ rkbrashear$ sudo -v; sudo find -xf /.Trashes /Volumes /Library /private /Temp* \
> -type f -size +200000 -print0 | sudo xargs -0 ls -lohdSr
find: /Temp*: No such file or directory
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 124M Nov 1 19:52 /private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_i386
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 154M Nov 1 20:13 /private/var/db/dyld/dyld_shared_cache_rosetta
-rw-rw-rw- 1 rbrashear 199M Nov 5 07:24 /Library/Application Support/Mac Minder/Debug Logs/monitor.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root 199M Nov 19 2003 /Library/Application Support/iDVD/Tutorial/Movies/Our First Snowman.mov
-rw------- 1 _installer 222M Nov 1 19:51 /Library/Receipts/db/a.receiptdb
-rw------T 1 root 2.0G Nov 5 06:44 /private/var/vm/sleepimage
R-Brashears-MacBook:~ rkbrashear$ IFS=$'\n'; for f in /Volumes /.Spotlight* /.Trashes /Library/Logs /private/\
> {var/{log,spool,db,vm,tmp},tmp} /Temp*; do sudo du -hsx $f; done; IFS=$' \t\n'
32K /Volumes
4.0K /.Spotlight-V100
0B /.Trashes
14M /Library/Logs
5.1M /private/var/log
476K /private/var/spool
290M /private/var/db
2.1G /private/var/vm
9.8M /private/var/tmp
0B /private/tmp
du: /Temp*: No such file or directory
R-Brashears-MacBook:~ rkbrashear$

Sorry, Hal, I wrote the last post before seeing your last post. I guess I'll proceed with a clean install this evening.

Yes, something very odd is going on.

Thanks for your advice, I do appreciate it.

Unless I'm missing something, I can't tell from reading your last 3 or 4 posts
whether or not you have run fsck (or DU from the DVD)... or even restarted.

Can you elaborate on *those* points?

I'm having pretty much exactly the same behavior. This is a brand-new Mac Mini that I just did a clean install of Leopard on. Space didn't begin disappearing until the first time I used Spotlight and then, bang, it started chewing up space until 18GB were gone before it quit. I used OmniDiskSweeper to find the culprit and it's the same .Spotlight-V100 folder. My total used space on the disk is about 31GB and 18GB of it is this folder. I'm with SaikungBob here; I could delete the folder, but I'd like to know what's going on. How can 13GB of data require 18GB of index?! Clearly there's a problem.

I've run DU from the Leopard install disk and it said everything looked OK. For the record, my vm file looks normal (not 2GB like Bob's). I'll be happy to run whatever tests recommended.

kd

> This is a brand-new Mac Mini that I just did a clean install of Leopard on.
[ . . . ]
> I've run DU from the Leopard install disk and it said everything looked OK.
[ . . ]
>How can 13GB of data require 18GB of index?!


No idea.
Starting to look like only 10.5.1 can fix this.

If your Mac is indeed "brand new", I would take it
to the Genius Counter at the nearest Apple Store
and see what they have to say about all this.

I'm experiencing the same issues with my MacBook, with 2GB ram too. Now I haven't run all the scripts, because I'm not as saavy at that as you all, but I do want to let everyone know that this is not an isolated incident.

Parallels kept crashing because of low disk space, and I would look down and see that I had 42 mb of disk left, then it would creep back up to 3 GB.

What is the 'basic' user supposed to do about all this when they don't want to 'risk' using terminal?

It truly is brand new. I recieved it direct from Apple last Thursday, but it came with Tiger installed. It did, however, have a Leopard install disk and everything has been peachy except for this behavior. I'm not sure whether there's a single Apple store in the entire state of Arkansas, so the Genius Counter isn't going to do much for me. I'll have to take it up with Apple directly, I suppose. But yeah, I think you're right. This looks like something only 10.5.1 will address.

kd

Hey, Hal, is it possible that Spotlight is building indexes for a network drive? I've got an XP machine on the network that uses the same login credentials as my Mac and I've accessed that machine's drive from the Mac as well. 18GB strikes me as excessive even to index that network drive, but I wonder if that could account for anything. Thoughts?

kd