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<blockquote data-quote="Randy B. Singer" data-source="post: 1874174" data-attributes="member: 190607">So, this is going to throw everybody for a loop...I've had users tell me that they have seen the above notice a handful of times now.&nbsp; In each and every instance, the problem had just about NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH PHYSICAL MEMORY (RAM),&nbsp; despite what the error message seems to clearly be saying. Which makes sense if you think about it.&nbsp; If your Mac runs out of real RAM, it just hits your hard drive and it uses virtual memory.&nbsp; You will get a bit of a slowdown when this happens, but never an error message.So, what is that error message usually about?&nbsp; It means that you are running out of contiguous hard drive space.&nbsp; And, in fact, you might still have many gigabytes of &quot;free&quot; hard drive space indicated if you do a Get Info on your hard drive.&nbsp; It's just that this remaining hard drive space is either/both being used for metadata, or it is badly fragmented and can't be used.&nbsp; (You may have heard that it's important to keep anywhere from 10% to 30% of your hard drive's space free.&nbsp; This is one of the situations that you are trying to avoid by doing that.)When that error message occurs, it means that your Mac needed more memory than your Mac had available as real RAM, it hit the hard drive to use it as virtual memory, and it didn't find a big enough chunk of free contiguous space on your hard drive.&nbsp; Your Mac can't use fragmented memory as virtual memory...hence the error message.See:[URL unfurl=&quot;true&quot;]http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html[/URL]Item #5 and Note #1</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Randy B. Singer, post: 1874174, member: 190607"] So, this is going to throw everybody for a loop... I've had users tell me that they have seen the above notice a handful of times now. In each and every instance, the problem had just about NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH PHYSICAL MEMORY (RAM), despite what the error message seems to clearly be saying. Which makes sense if you think about it. If your Mac runs out of real RAM, it just hits your hard drive and it uses virtual memory. You will get a bit of a slowdown when this happens, but never an error message. So, what is that error message usually about? It means that you are running out of contiguous hard drive space. And, in fact, you might still have many gigabytes of "free" hard drive space indicated if you do a Get Info on your hard drive. It's just that this remaining hard drive space is either/both being used for metadata, or it is badly fragmented and can't be used. (You may have heard that it's important to keep anywhere from 10% to 30% of your hard drive's space free. This is one of the situations that you are trying to avoid by doing that.) When that error message occurs, it means that your Mac needed more memory than your Mac had available as real RAM, it hit the hard drive to use it as virtual memory, and it didn't find a big enough chunk of free contiguous space on your hard drive. Your Mac can't use fragmented memory as virtual memory...hence the error message. See: [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html[/URL] Item #5 and Note #1 [/QUOTE]

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