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goblueguy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 30, 2011
4
0
My mac mini has around 75GB of free space when restarted, but for some reason the free space drops off dramatically very quickly. I restarted last night, but this morning its already down to 60GB and I'm getting the occasional pinwheel popup. Sometimes it gets down to 20GB, it's not even usable at this point as even scrolling down a web page causes the pinwheel to popup for minutes at a time. Any idea what could be causing the massive loss of free space and slow down so quickly? It's mainly used as a web machine, I use firefox as my browser. Occasionally I do iphone development with Xcode but I haven't used xcode since it was last restarted.
 
Time machine is not enabled.

I used the grand perspective application and found a series of large files called swap files. There were a large number of them and they were all in excess of 1GB. I did some research on them and found out they may be linked to a reoccurring print request. I ended up finding an item in a print queue that has been there since December. I'm going to keep an eye on the swap files for a few days to see if they continue to go out of control.
 
If you use photoshop and have only one hard drive, Photoshop will use that hard drive as a scratch disk. A scratch disk contains the opened, raw file before it's compressed into PSD. This can be several gigabytes for larger files.

Often times after quitting CS3 I gain about 10GB's or so of HDD space.
 
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