[X Servers] Invisible disk space usage

[Jerome Camus]

Thanx Ken,

I found the offending program in the meantime...  There weren't that 
many smoking guns to hunt for!

And yes, I could see how the program was acting up - essentially a 
bad index making any attempt to read the data go into a tizzy not 
ever reaching an end-of-file.  replaced it with a backUp and this are 
running Ok again...

I instinctively knew that virtual memory could end-up being limitless 
(i.e not pre-defined but based on what the machine has available). 
Now I know for real.  Thanx for the pointer !

>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
>
>
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