It looks like SwapCop has been updated for 10.2 compatibility, at last! http://homepage.mac.com/jschrier/
This little program lets you move OS X's virtual memory file from the system drive onto any other volume. It's generally regarded as good practice on all OSs which support virtual memory to keep the VM on a dedicated volume. On systems like OS X and Windows NT/2K/XP where the VM file can go in a partition with other data, and grows and shrinks in use, it's a good idea to keep it in a dedicated partition. That way, the OS doesn't have to search through the filesystem to access it, and neither the VM file nor the others on the volume will get fragmented by the growth and shrinkage. On other systems (such as Linux) where VM normally requires a dedicated partition and is therefore a fixed size, this isn't a problem. However, in both cases, it's good if you can to put it on a different hard disk to the OS itself - that way, VM disk accesses and other ones don't interfere with one another. Better still, put it on a disk on a different controller. If you have enough RAM for OS X, it doesn't use VM heavily. With only one or 2 apps in use on my 304MB machine, the VM file sits at 17KB ( yes, *kilobytes)* and never grows. Open up Mail and Chimera and Parlance and Classic and AOL, though, and it soon starts to eat swap. Then, having VM on a different disk helps. Since most older Macs have an small SCSI disk as well as a newer big SCSI or IDE disk, you can easily dedicate your old SCSI drive to VM. My 2GB Apple drive is partitioned into 1.5GB for a clean copy of MacOS 9.1 and 500MB for OS X VM, on a UFS volume so MacOS 9 can't see it at all. I used SwapCop on 10.1 to move the VM onto the dedicated drive and it seemed to help quite a bit. However, upgrading to Jaguar broke it. Now I've moved it back again and the machine seems considerably more responsive, especially under load. There may not be a disk access light, but I can *hear* it swapping to the old SCSI drive - my new IDE drive is silent, I can't hear it over the PSU fan. STRONGLY recommended for anyone using OS X on a machine with more than one hard disk - or anyone who can dedicate a small partition (of 2-4x the amount of physical RAM) to it. -- Liam Proven � Homepage: http://welcome.to/liamsweb -- Unsupported OS X is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Unsupported OS X list info <http://lowendmac.com/lists/unsupported.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive <http://www.mail-archive.com/unsupportedosx%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
