[X Servers] Invisible disk space usage

[Ken Rossman]

On Thursday, March 27, 2003, at 03:13 AM, Jerome Camus wrote:
> A strange behaviour has appeared in the past 48 hours on an OS X server
> 10.1.4.  Apparently, the available disk space is dropping precipitously
> - about 3 gb being consumed daily...

I had seen this sort of behavior back when I was running some less-well-
behaved application programs that ate up virtual memory quite 
irresponsibly.

Swap files were being created at a rather high rate, chewing up disk 
space
at the rate of 80MB each time a new file was created.  Rebooting will,
of course, kill the offending application and it will start over from
scratch, slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) eating up disk space all over
again.

Next time you see disk space disappearing like that, check how many
files of the form "swapfileNN" you have in /private/var/vm.  If it's
more than just a few, then that's a definite clue.

Next, you'll want to see which programs are running currently and see
who is pigging out on virtual memory.  Start up a terminal window and
make it as large (high and wide) as you have space for, and then execute
the command:

     ps auxww | more

Have a look at the VSZ column and look for any programs that look like
they have excessively large numbers there.

Can't tell you exactly what to do with the offending program if/when
you find it, though.  That'll depend on who wrote it and if they are
willing to fix it.

/K