How To: Temporary fix to OS X runaway memory hog (pdftopdf)
Short version:
- Merrily working away, writing a document, in email, printing an attachment, browsing web, etc. All very standard.
- All of a sudden, no disk space left! But wait a sec, I had 13Gb free on my system disk (an SSD) just a few minutes ago! Now the system is extremely sluggish. No spare RAM! HDD disk is now nearly full. All has gone to custard.
- Cue a flurry of attempts to find out the cause of the problem… rapid disk filling seems to be related to a spotlight bug. Disable Spotlight on all disks. No joy, didn’t make anything better.
- All troubleshooting is to no avail. Go to bed.
The next morning, after a bunch of searching the web, I realise that I am not viewing ALL processes in Activity Monitor. When I view all, there’s an obvious culprit – pdftopdf is consuming all RAM, and the Virtual Memory then fills up the HDD.
Killed pdftopdf.
All well for now.
Looks like a rogue pdf file I was emailed (perfectly innocently).
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=pdftopdf&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Mac-printing-and-scanning/pdftopdf-eats-up-all-the-free-memory-on-a-snow-leopard-mac/td-p/216498
http://discussions.info.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11004321
System back to normal now.