>This is spoken more from theory, as I don't know the specifics of
>virtual memory algorithms on Mac OS X. As somebody mentioned before --
>having 20% of your disk free won't hurt, but in many cases it's way
>more than needed and might unnecessarily scare people ("Oh my God! I
>only have 19% free! I have to randomly delete something!")
My guess would be, the need for 10-20% free has more to do with
fragmentation then with actual drive space needed. If you keep 20% of
your drive free, you are more likely to have a few hundred meg that is
not fragmented, or barely fragmented. Virtual Memory swaps suffer greatly
from drive fragmentation. That's one of the reasons that many other *nix
OSes have a "swap" partition. That gives a chunk of space set aside
specifically for the use of virtual memory. It helps keep it from
becoming fragmented.
But you are right, Virtual Memory disk space usage isn't based on how big
the drive is. You can keep it 99% full, just defragment the drive. You
shouldn't be able to fill up the drive to the point that virutal memory
can't work. IIRC, OS X creates a virtual memory page file of appropriate
size, so your available space on the drive is already taking into account
the space used by virtual memory. (which then REALLY shoots down the
10-20% theory to allow it to work, because that free space is after VM is
counted anyway).
-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>
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