Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems 158 GB of /var/log/asl/ crap

I've ran into this before, but not found any hard answers. This user had 2800 files in that folder, gobbling up 158gb of hdd space. (they were here on the warning of out of disk space on their 320gb drive, asking us to copy some data off to ext hdd)

So has anyone figured out what causes this? In the time it has taken me to write this post, the only new log file it created since reboot has grown from 28mb to 38mb, so I assume all I've done is buy time by deleting the files.

Have you looked in Console to see what is generating all those log files? That is probably the easiest way to identify the source of the problem. At least that will give you a starting place to determine and cure the cause.

I didn't look this time but have looked in the past and not found anything useful

if you search at Google for:

Macintosh /var/log/asl/

you get quite a few hits about this topic. I did not read through enough of them to find a pattern to the underlying causes, but this page was especially detailed about the remedy:

http://www.dimitri.eu/mac-osx-slow-caused-by-aslmanager/

they tell how to fix the cpu usage but not how to stop it. usually things like this have a cause, causing an app or the logger itself to crash or bug, and that causes the cpu and disk space side effects. I'd like to find a fix for the cause.

Other threads suggested using Terminal to look at the individual log files in the /var/log/asl directory and seeing what processes are referred to in them.

its a problem with asl itself dumping messages to its log. it's not asl GENERATING large log files elsewhere. it's own log files are the problem.

I had thought that a specific process other than asl manager was causing the asl manager logs to be written, as shown in this example:

http://superuser.com/questions/267685/what-is-filling-up-var-log-asl-files

If I open one of my asl log files, a specific process that was mentioned in the All Messages log is specified at the start. I have a lot of postfix errors, and errors caused by a not fully configured screen calibration program.