01-20-2007, 09:09 PM

well, I just deleted my wife's i tunes library and put it on her new macbook. I freed up about 12 VERY needed gigs of space.

Well, this morning entourage wouldnt launch, I clicked on my HD and it said I had nearly 0 MB of space remaining. Closed it, opened it again.. and it worked, then my HD said I had the regular 12.x gigs of space available.

Well, I havn't downloaded a single thign but somehow I now only have 8.x gigs of space available.

What's going on here?

it's a 17" Powerbook G4, 1.33 ghz.

01-20-2007, 09:32 PM

try cleaning your caches with a program like onyx.
then keep an eye on it. you'll probably regain a little space. and it could fix the wonky space reporting you're seeing. keep an eye on that afterwards and let us know what happens.

01-20-2007, 10:42 PM

Eric, I used my inventory system and discovered these two things..



what exactly is "windowserver.log"?? I dont remember those being there a couple days ago. with that being over 9 gigs of space.. it'd be nice to know exactly what it is.

01-20-2007, 10:50 PM

oh, i've heard of people having that issue. it can be deleted. a new one will be made by the apps that use it or the system. it could have happened due to a looping process or application issue.

keep an eye out for it. if it happens again, try to isolate the issue to one application.

01-20-2007, 10:56 PM

interesting. What could possibly need 9 gb of space and have done that in only a few days? How weird.

Anyway for me to find out what applications use it or start it up? and where would I go to delete both those window log files?

It's odd, I just ran a "repair permissions" and lost about 200mb of space afterwards.

Is computer just being funky?

01-20-2007, 11:08 PM

follow the path in the utility you used to find and delete those files:
private/var/log/

onyx may or may not include those as part of it's cache cleaning, so you may want to try that first, and then recheck for thsoe files in the utility you have there in the screenshot. then delete manually if they're still there.

01-20-2007, 11:15 PM

it's very odd. Ever since i deleted my wife's MP3s my computer has been a bit "off".

My HD space has gone from 12 gigs, to 0mb, to 8gigs, and now is around 6.5gigs and I've done absolutely nothing.. this has all happened in the past 12 or so hours.

I deleted the windows log, but the space on my HD didnt change at all.

What's happening here?

01-20-2007, 11:16 PM

please don't be insulted by this, i just have to ask; did you empty the trash afterwords?

01-20-2007, 11:18 PM

How about a restart? Usually the info will refresh after a restart.

01-20-2007, 11:22 PM

eric, empited the trash (of course) and I still have both those windows log's in my system. I for the life of me cannot find this "private" folder.

This is funky.

01-20-2007, 11:26 PM

onyx will let you see hidden files too - its a preference switch. this may help you.

and MHC is right too... have you restarted?

01-20-2007, 11:31 PM

I saw a MacOSXHints forum thread on this: "System Disk is Full". Can I delete /private/var ??

From the thread, this post:

Hi, I just experienced this problem after leaving my machine on over night and finding only 150M free. It's not likely that windows caused your problem because I'm running 10.4.8 on a PowerPC Powerbook G4 -- since I switched I haven't even copied a single .exe to my drive.

Here's a few notes on getting back to a healthy state.

1) You can delete the log file. After all, it's just a log and unless you're doing something tricky programming wise, you probably don't care about its contents anyway.

2) The log file keeps growing because something in your running version of Windowserver has broken. If you run 'tail -f /var/log/windowserver.log' you can see that it adds quite a few messages every second.

3) To fix the problem either restart your system or -- because I personally haven't yet found a problem that really needs you to restart your Mac/linux machine -- just launch "Activity Monitor" and stop all of the windows server processes. There might be a few of them and you'll be asked for your root password. *NOTE: Close/save your open programs because killing the windowserver process will close all programs -- but not gracefully.*

4) To make sure this worked, just log back in and then check the size of the windowserver.log file again. It should be at a healthy minimum once again. You can again delete the 'windowserver_last.log' and 'windowserver.log' files under /var/log to clear up any remaining chunks. This is the first time this has happened to me in the 2 years of Mac ownership but just like any software, I do believe weird problems can creep in existing bugs (in Tiger) are fixed.

You will need to use the Terminal though. Read the entire thread for the details.

01-20-2007, 11:48 PM

well i was able to delete one of the log files, but not the other.. got back mack up to about 11.5 gigs.. still 1 gb less then last night when I deleted my wife's itunes library.

The computer is being rather laggy now.

this is all after a restart as well.