Your Mac OS X Startup disk has no more space available for application memory

Joined
May 5, 2009
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Your Mac's Specs
MacBook Pro with Retina Display: Core i7 2.3GHz, 16GB, 256GB, Mountain Lion
We are getting this message on a 2009 Unibody MacBook. The Memory has been upgrade to 4GB about 6 months ago. The hard drive has about 40-60GB free space. I have done a repair permissions and repair disk, and it did not help. Does anyone have any suggestions to help with this? I know it looks like a lot of applications, but most are close but still running, user hit the red "x" instead of command Q.

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vansmith

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Queensland
Your Mac's Specs
Mini (2014, 2018, 2020), MBA (2020), iPad Pro (2018), iPhone 13 Pro Max, Watch (S6)
Closing the windows (the red button) won't help to release much memory. By using the red close button, you are in essence telling the operating system to close the windows but keep the application open in active memory.

The issue with memory is that it could be something hiding in the background gobbling up your memory or it could be something in the "foreground" like a web browser. Looking at that list, I notice you have Firefox open - it is notorious for leaking (eating up) memory and it's so bad that people have developed extensions to manage this (see here for example).

This problem will only get worse over time as the application slowly eats away at whatever memory it can get its metaphorical hands on (Safari is another example of an application that leaks memory left, right and centre). If you haven't, quit those applications are reopen them.
 

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