1.2 GB of HD space filling up until restart

[lizardthefish]

I am running a 10GB HD with 1.2GB available space. Upon running apps such as photoshop and flash mx 2004 pro for a day or so it starts telling me the drive is full. saving out my work and killing the apps doesn't get rid of whatever is eating up my memory. but upon a restart it is back to telling me i have 1.2 GB available. kinda gets annoying when it tops out the hd before i can save out my work. any ideas? more of my system stats are in the signature below.

thanks for any input.

 

[Murlyn]

Yeah in Photoshop preferences you need to tell it to delete the cache on quit.. or you can manually delete the cache whenever you feel like it. Im not sure where it is found in PS CS, but with a little looking, now that you know what to you look for, you should be able to find it.

 

[lizardthefish]

thanks murlyn. I'll see to that setting. that will probably help a lot but I would add that this symptom is not limited to while running photoshop. It also does it when I have open flash mx 2004 pro solely. It doesn't take intensive work and it happens even if flash is open in the background for a whole day while working on other things. i am not sure whether to point the finger at flash or at some sort of memory management with panther. i ain't got skeels enough to make that kinda call.

thanks again.

lizard

 

[Murlyn]

Hmm.. very interesting.. maybe you can download "Where is my disk space?" install it.. and then right when you start your machine copy and paste the information from the program into a text file.. save it, close the program.. and then go about your normal day.. then at the end of the day when your hard drive is full of who knows what.. run the program again and see if you can find the differences between the two files and then you'll see where the bulk of your space is going.

Or you can do a backup with a program that will allow incremental backups in the morning.. then in the afternoon.. do an incremental backup for all those files that have changed on your system and then take notice of what those files are.

Or you can click on your desktop and hit Command-F which brings up a search dialogue box and search for all files that have a modified or creation date since this morning when you started your computer...

I hope some of these will help

 

[lizardthefish]

follow up

I got 'Where's My Disk Space' here:

http://www.landsbert.freeserve.co.uk/diskspace/

Thanks again for the tip. I will use this to get more detail.

Just to follow up. PhotoShop is behaving reliably when I quit by dropping the memory it gobbled up. My biggest solution will be a new HD but that is near future rather than now.

Thanks

Lizard

 

[Murlyn]

Yep once photoship is out of memory.. it has some serious problems

 

[lizardthefish]

I used 'where is my hd space?' to find out that of 1.7GB available photoshop and illustrator gobble up all of it, but upon quiting they release most of it. then there are these (not all of them, but a couple of them) that are not all gone upon exiting all apps:

/private/var/vm/swapfile0
/private/var/vm/swapfile1
/private/var/vm/swapfile2
/private/var/vm/swapfile3
/private/var/vm/swapfile4

I assume these swapfiles are used by these workhorse apps, though I don't know technically what a swapfile type is.

is it safe to delete these files if i have closed down my apps and want a fresh start on the drive space? must i restart to get them to clear out?


Lizard