Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 12:21 PM +0100 3/22/03, Marco Baroni wrote: >> >>Now: the script was over and it looked like it finished its job >>successfully (OK -- I had no serious error handling...). I did a >>top, and I could not see any suspicious looking process. Still, the >>computer was very very slow. I had to reboot -- it also took a while >>to reboot, but now it is working fine again. > > When this happens I always do a quick > > ls -l /var/vm > > and see what's in there. That's where OS X keeps its swap files, and > if there are a lot of them its a sign that the system's taking up > rather a lot of memory. (They get automatically cleaned up when > they're empty) Even if they're mostly empty, there seems to be a lot > of overhead in having them. > > Sometimes if you find the processes that have a lot of VM allocated > (large VSZ in a "ps aux") you can kill them off and find things get > snappier, but that doesn't help if it's a system process. Some of > those seem to get larger as you continue to do odd things to them. > (The window server process seems prone to this when used with X, as > the X servers all seem to have resource tracking leakage issues, > though killing off X will usually free up most of the memory)
I'm very curious about how OS X works with swap partitions, as I've not seen it mentioned overmuch. I'm sure there's a reason linux preferentially uses a swap partition rather than using the main drive partitions. In fact, of every drive I've added to my Linux box, I've dedicated a small portion of it to swap memory. Can anyone point me to information regarding setting up a swap partition under OS X, and whether or not this is an installation option? (and if not, why not?)
