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The Final Cut

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 5, 2009
378
0
randomly as I am working on it the SSD space will gradually disappear, the fans will spin up super loud and it will become unresponsive. any idea? i have all updates... and i think its sleep related?
 

motulist

macrumors 601
Dec 2, 2003
4,235
611
When the MBA starts to slow down, open up Activity Monitor and when it's sorted by the CPU usage column take a look to see if there's any run away process that's eating up like 250% of your CPUs. Then report back to us on what you saw and we'll be able to help you.
 

Thiol

macrumors 6502a
Jan 26, 2008
693
0
randomly as I am working on it the SSD space will gradually disappear, the fans will spin up super loud and it will become unresponsive. any idea? i have all updates... and i think its sleep related?

What do you mean by "the SSD space will gradually disappear".

You wouldn't happen to be erasing free space with Disk Utility, would you?
 

mark28

macrumors 68000
Jan 29, 2010
1,632
2
This is clearly not the issue here.

If you don't have enough RAM, hard disk space is being used. If his disk space is decreasing over time, it can definitely be attributed by not having enough RAM.
 

The Final Cut

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 5, 2009
378
0
I have 4GB. But this really absurd I have never seen a computer Issue like this. I have 7GB free SSD space then about 1GB per minute start disappearing, as If I am copying something to the drive. Its fine now but the next time I will try and use activity monitor to figure it out.
 

zinka

macrumors regular
Nov 27, 2009
193
0
I have 4GB. But this really absurd I have never seen a computer Issue like this. I have 7GB free SSD space then about 1GB per minute start disappearing, as If I am copying something to the drive. Its fine now but the next time I will try and use activity monitor to figure it out.

One of your applications is going nuts, allocating memory, and causing the Mac to use more swap. Use Activity Monitor or 'top' to figure out what's using more and more memory.
 

mark28

macrumors 68000
Jan 29, 2010
1,632
2
I have 4GB. But this really absurd I have never seen a computer Issue like this. I have 7GB free SSD space then about 1GB per minute start disappearing, as If I am copying something to the drive. Its fine now but the next time I will try and use activity monitor to figure it out.

Check what your page in and out is under activity monitor, that will tell you whether or not it's a RAM problem. :)

If the problem is caused by VMware, it's easy to fix since there are settings on how much RAM it can use.
 

bcaslis

macrumors 68020
Mar 11, 2008
2,184
237
One of your applications is going nuts, allocating memory, and causing the Mac to use more swap. Use Activity Monitor or 'top' to figure out what's using more and more memory.

+1, you obviously have a misbehaving app. Use Activity Monitor to figure out which one.
 

MacManTexas56

macrumors 68020
Apr 4, 2005
2,496
384
randomly as I am working on it the SSD space will gradually disappear, the fans will spin up super loud and it will become unresponsive. any idea? i have all updates... and i think its sleep related?

i have the same problem with my SSD space. i won't be doing anything in any other program except browsing in chrome and i can watch my gb space decreasing. it's been totally random. no fan issues here at all. it also increases randomly as well. it's very strange and i've never had the problem before. you are definitely not alone.
 

hayduke

macrumors 65816
Mar 8, 2005
1,177
2
is a state of mind.
I have 4GB. But this really absurd I have never seen a computer Issue like this. I have 7GB free SSD space then about 1GB per minute start disappearing, as If I am copying something to the drive. Its fine now but the next time I will try and use activity monitor to figure it out.

That isn't a lot of free space. I don't know what the current recommendations are, but the OS needs some free space to write things to disk for normal operation. You might try having closer to 12-15GB free and see if the helps.
 

sjinsjca

macrumors 68020
Oct 30, 2008
2,239
557
I've never seen this with mine. Might a genius bar appt. be in order?

+1. This is very weird.

The suggestion to check what apps are running and using CPU cycles is an excellent one. Do that, and click the "CPU" column header so it's ranked in descending order of CPU usage; I'd be very curious to know what's eating up your system.

Could you have a bug of some sort? They're rare on Macs, but it does happen, usually if someone downloads something too-good-to-be-true (such as a "free" version of a commercial package) from a warez site.
 

bamf

macrumors 6502
Feb 14, 2008
413
0
Just another thought here.

This sounds like idle garbage collection happening on the SSD. If you free up some space on your drive, I think the performance degradation will quit.

Anandtech.com had an excellent article on the SSD used in the new MBAs that you could read for reference on this.

Article on anandtech.com
 
Last edited:

Thiol

macrumors 6502a
Jan 26, 2008
693
0
Just another thought here.

This sounds like idle garbage collection happening on the SSD. If you free up some space on your drive, I think the performance degradation will quit.

Anandtech.com had an excellent article on the SSD used in the new MBAs that you could read for reference on this.

Article on anandtech.com

Idle garbage collection shouldn't be reducing the SSD space like that...
 

johannnn

macrumors 68020
Nov 20, 2009
2,315
2,602
Sweden
If you don't have enough RAM, hard disk space is being used. If his disk space is decreasing over time, it can definitely be attributed by not having enough RAM.
But I don't see how it leads to "the fans will spin up super loud and it will become unresponsive."
 
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