Open Radar

 
This entire progression may sound bizzarre, but it’s a degenerate interaction that I can reproduce pretty regularly:

When I download an entire TV series at once, iTunes will happily fill my hard disk until 0k is free. This will make everything beachball because there is no swap space anymore. It will make iTunes itself complain every 2 seconds and whenever it is not in the foreground that it can’t save its library (hence the data loss).

If I try to delete files again in iTunes (one HD movie should usually be enough) iTunes will happily move the file to the trash. However, iTunes will hold on to that file, so that when I empty the trash it will display “This file is in use and can’t be deleted”. The only way to resolve that is to either delete a file that doesn’t belong to iTunes, or quitting iTunes (thus losing your library).

Additionally, Finder (10.9.4) is so starved for resources that the best it will do is open empty windows showing a spinner. And Spotlight will suddenly refuse to show anything but documents. So there’s no way for me to delete the files (or any others) manually.

Expected:
1) iTunes should do like all other apps and stop its downloads earlier. Most apps these days seem to leave ~ 1GB free on the boot disk.
2) iTunes should not keep media files open that aren’t currently playing, particularly ones it has just moved to the trash. If it didn’t keep them open, that’d also let me use a tool like Hazel to e.g. move and symlink these files to another disk, or do something else to prevent the hard disk from filling up.