My mac mini had a 30 gig swap file this morning.

[steve knight]

i have a early 2009 mac mini and I have noticed that I had been getting a swap file. I have 4 gigs of ram and I don't ever remember having a swap file. seems it started with parallels saying I was running another session when I was not. so it made a swap file
well after rebooting that seems to have gone away but I noticed I always have a small swap file. even though i have over 2 gigs of free memory.
well running the newest version of 64 bit handbrake leaving it running when I go to bed I have found twice all my free hard drive space has been used as a swap file. I get the message that I am out of hard drive space and every thing is paused or not responding.
I have to reboot to get things back to normal. time may fix it but who knows?
I don't have anything new running and parallels is not running in the background.
so why do i have a swap file at all with 2 gigs of free memory? my wifes mac mini with only 2 gigs does not have a swap file.

 

[WesCole]

Reviving an old thread because this same thing happened to me last night.

Mac Mini
2.54 C2D
4GB RAM

I even had handbrake set to save the encoded movies to my external drive and it still filled up my internal hard drive about 8 or 9 movies into the queue.

Any new info on this?

Thanks,

Wes

 

[steve knight]

it started happening with other things if I remembered right. I ended up doing a clean install and a tm restore.

 

[WesCole]

Thanks for the reply.

What was really weird is that everything worked great until I went to sleep...it encoded 4 or 5 movies perfectly while I was there tending to it. I guess that is how it goes, though. Might try adding less files to the queue tonight and see what happens.

Thanks,

Wes

 

[steve knight]

I have been using it since with all night sessions and I have not had any problem at all anymore.

 

[WesCole]

One more question if you don't mind....

Do you use any of the nightly builds or just the latest stable release?

Wes

 

[steve knight]

One more question if you don't mind....

Do you use any of the nightly builds or just the latest stable release?

Wes

only the official. and those don't come often.

 

[Idgit]

Same thing happened to me last night on my Mini running the CLI version of Handbrake overnight. Woke up to an out of disk space error and 25 swap files.

I was trying to convert an AVI that wasn't playing properly in Plex or XBMC. I first tried VisualHub, but it predicted that the conversion to MP4 would take 3 hours for the file (which was only 40 minutes long). That wasn't normal, so I tried Handbrake.

Obviously, there was something unusual or corrupted about the AVI that caused both VisualHub and Handbrake to struggle with it. In Handbrake's case, it just kept creating swap files until it ran out of space.