"No more space available for application memory"

I'm having trouble understanding why my MacBook Pro (purchased new in June) is saying that it can't run Safari and Finder at the same time. I have plenty of open space on the hard drive, but it says there is not enough space to run even one program?

Anyone have advice or ideas as to why this message keeps popping up?

Much appreciated.

How much HD space do you have left? The memory management system needs a certain amount of HD space if caching to the HD is necessary. So, did you manage to fill up your entire hard drive already?

Doug

BTW, putting the Mac to sleep already takes 4 gigs in and of its self. This is "sleepimage. OS X reserves HD space equal to the amount of installed RAM for this.

Do me a favor and post a screenshot of Activity Monitor and click on the system memory tab at the bottom. Let's see what's going on there.

Doug

Doug b said:

BTW, putting the Mac to sleep already takes 4 gigs in and of its self. This is "sleepimage. OS X reserves HD space equal to the amount of installed RAM for this.

Do me a favor and post a screenshot of Activity Monitor and click on the system memory tab at the bottom. Let's see what's going on there.

Doug

Click to expand...

Here's the weird thing, I have 217 GB available on my startup disk. Here's the Activity Monitor:

Now that, is strange. I need a screenshot of the memory tab at the bottom, not the cpu tab. Wanted to check for page in/outs. When was the last time you did a cold boot? That definitely shouldn't be happening. What apps do you have installed please?

Doug

Doug b said:

Now that, is strange. I need a screenshot of the memory tab at the bottom, not the cpu tab. Wanted to check for page in/outs. When was the last time you did a cold boot? That definitely shouldn't be happening. What apps do you have installed please?

Doug

Click to expand...

Have to admit that I'm not even sure what a cold boot is...

Installed apps include Spotify, Evernote, Wunderlist, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Rockmelt, Opera, Skype, Adium, Yammer and Destroy Twitter.

Here's the screen shot you're looking for:

My next guess would be something software related that you've been running. Parallels to run Windows perhaps? Or maybe something running in the background with a memory leak? Could be lots of things, but software would be my next best guess.

Doug

So? What's the story...