I have a 2010 MacBook Air–ancient, and I need a new one, but it gets the job done.
Until recently. It’s running very slowly, I get the spinning beach ball a lot, and the finder now crashes sometimes, which it never has before.
The drive was (is?) pretty full, at about 180 of 250 GB. So I moved some files off the computer and deleted them on the MacBook, about 13 GB in all, but the available/used numbers didn’t change. Restarted–no change.
After some research into the problem, I reset Spotlight. No change.
Dowloaded OmniDiskSweeper and trashed at least another 20 GB of files–no change.
Ran MalwareBytes–nothing found.
What is going on here? Is my computer about to die?
PS, I’m running High Sierra because I got tired of being nagged about updates. Is this one of those things where Apple is deliberately strangling performance for older devices with a new OS?
Yes, the trash is empty. I emptied it and restarted after each round of deletions.
I suppose it’s possible that Time Machine was used by the prior owner and there are some snapshots hiding on the computer. But I don’t think that’s the (whole) problem–I should be seeing the available memory increase, but it doesn’t change.
There were a bunch of disc-space related issues to the APFS conversion of SSDs in High Sierra beta releases, but I’m not aware of any in the current release.
It’s possible that your disc is subtly corrupted. A restart into single-user mode, and forcing an fsck_apfs might help.
If you go to About this Mac->Storage, what do you see?
I’ve been using Memory Clean 2, then 3 (see the App Store) for several years, and have found it does a good job of compacting and freeing memory. The paid version, which does a better job than the “free” version, costs $9.99. My experience is Safari and Apple Mail are ridiculous memory hogs, by the way; Firefox 60.0.1 seems to control memory more robustly, and also responds to Memory Clean better than does Safari, in my opinion.
The Memory Clean product might be worth your while. All the best!
Hmmm. In About This Mac it says 130 of 250 GB available. If I do Apple-I on the hard drive icon (which is how I had been checking the memory), it now says 130 GB available (up from 68 in all prior checks), but it still says 181 GB are being used, which is obviously impossible.
I’m going to try your suggestion now.
ETA: Beowulff’s suggestion that is. Regarding Memory Clean, I was under the impression that Mac OS was supposed to optimize storage on its own, but maybe that’s not happening, or Memory Clean can do it better.
Memory Clean is totally irrelevant to your problem. That app manages memory, that is RAM. Your problem is with the disk, which is completely different than memory. Your thread title unfortunately muddies things, but it’s clear from your description that disk space is the issue, nothing to do with memory.
Okay, I tried the single-user process suggested by beowulff, and it says the disk is fine and no repairs were made.
“About this Mac” now says only 67 GB available. Before the largest single chunk of space used was 84 GB for “documents”, now it says the biggest chunk is 166 GB for “system.”
And as I was typing, the numbers changed–now it says 130 GB available, and 102 GB are taken up by “system.”
Something’s weird here. Do I need the pros?
PS, Apple-I on the hard drive still says 130 available, 181 used.
I think you are OK.
There are lots of caches and temporary files that come and go.
Also, what the Finder thinks of “in use” may not jive with what the System profiler does.
You only care about the first line (/dev/disk1s1). It says you have 61 GiB available (169 GiB used) in a 234 GiB partition. (These are gibibytes; multiply by 1.074 to get (decimal) gigabytes.) This is the actual amount of free space on the disk, regardless of caching or whatever About this Mac or other high level tools are doing to try to classify the space as Documents, System, etc. If you delete files, you should see this number change appropriately the next time you run df.
Okay, I deleted a little more than 2 GB of files and now I have 62 GB available…what with conversions from binary to decimal and rounding, I can buy that.
I guess it’s impossible to know since I didn’t do this check before I started chopping back the weeds, but given the amount I already deleted, I’m guessing I was close to capacity on the HD, which was probably slowing everything. Does that seem right?