OS X Lion behaving oddly after upgrading to 16GB RAM

I got the "System is low on disk space/memory" error as well as a number of other intermittent problems when I upgraded my original apple memory. It turned out to be either bad memory, or marginal timing specs.

Startup disk has no more space available for application memory?

When I put the original memory back in, the problems went away - so try that if you've exhausted your other options.

I did eventually do a little more research and found a 16GB set that very closely matched Apple specs for my early 2011 macbook pro 17 memory, and it's had no problems for several months now.

I suggest trying out the original apple memory and seeing if the problem goes away. If it does, return the memory you have, and see if you can get a different set that works better.

I looked into it some more and what my OS is trying to do is create the sleepimage file. This file I believe is being used for hibernation, even though I'm not trying to hibernate at the moment. Maybe Lion is trying to be smart and have that file created beforehand so that just in case I want to hibernate/sleep it can do that quickly.

So it kind of makes sense that 16gb of RAM would require 16gb of disk space, if you want Lion's safe sleep feature. So options are to either disable this feature or live with 16gb of your hardrive being taken up for this feature.

I called Mushkin support (the makers of my memory), they weren't very useful but said 'I was on the right track', lol.

I'll run some memory tests and look into how this safe sleep features works some more. But for now, I think this is the cause of this problem. I think the memory is fine.

If people think otherwise though and that this is not normal behavior of OSX, let me know!