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I run the latest OS X Lion on my MacBook Air. Whenever I put it to sleep and then wake it up it eats up a lot of space.

I believe all this space goes into the system cache which then again I keep deleting via OnyX. This again makes it impossible to reboot properly. If I reboot after completing a cache cleaning via OnyX then everything starts crashing: browsers, every application.

Then again I reboot and things work fine.

How do I avoid this space being eaten up? What tool is safe to use to free up this cache space?

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    I wouldn't wonder if the system started misbehaving when you're forcibly clearing caches. OS X usually does a good job of housekeeping for itself. Please explain what you mean by eating up a lot of space. OS X has to create an image of your RAM contents to perform a "safe" sleep, meaning that when there is a power loss, you can reboot nonetheless without data loss. What's the output of pmset -g | grep hibernatemode when run from a Terminal?
    – slhck
    Jan 6, 2013 at 12:52

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It's saving the safe sleep data in the 'sleepimage' file in /var/vm. What's likely happening is that OnyX is deleting everything in /var/vm, which includes system swap information. You could try deleting that sleepimage file and seeing if that works using the following command:

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

But that file should be present in order to properly put your computer into safe sleep mode in case of power failure. If you want to totally turn off safe sleep, you can run the following command:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

That will turn off safe sleep. Just be aware that if you do either of these, your computer will completely shut down if it runs out of battery power, rather than saving your information and hibernating gracefully.

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