[kernel_panic]

I've pretty happy with my uptime thus far, but my swapfiles have gotten out of control in the process. I have 24 swapfiles at 80MB each!

I don't have another HD to use for the swapfiles, so that suggestion is out. Is it possible for me to just delete the files?

This machine has 768MB RAM, so I didn't think I would be using that much VM.

[alien]

I think it can be pretty dangerous to delete the swapfiles. There are utilities (Cache Out X) that do this, but they recommend rebooting immediately.

It's better to find out what program(s) are causing this. How many apps are open, and what type of work are they doing? Try quitting them one by one. The dynamic_pager should begin reducing the number of swapfiles. Also, log out and back in. That should leave you with one or two.

You can also open the Terminal, and enter the 'top' command to get a view of what apps are running. There are some memory usage indicators there too.

BTW, I have 384MB RAM, and usually have three swapfiles at most. But some disk images that launch automatically and begin installing, seem to increase the number of swapfiles way too much. Apple's Safari .dmg is one. If this happens, I log out.

[philzilla]

are you logging out/in? i know this doesn't clear them all, but it cures some things

is uptime such a big deal, though? if a mac is acting weird on me, and it's been up more than about 7-10 days (for example), i'll just reboot the frigger. no questions asked.

however, i wouldn't start deleting swap files. nope.

[Drizzt]

Originally posted by philzilla:
are you logging out/in? i know this doesn't clear them all, but it cures some things

is uptime such a big deal, though? if a mac is acting weird on me, and it's been up more than about 7-10 days (for example), i'll just reboot the frigger. no questions asked.

however, i wouldn't start deleting swap files. nope.

ChacheOut deletes the swap files and tells you to reboot? I hope they're not asking for that.. because the OS does it by itself!

If you take a look at the ini scripts of the OS, you'll notice that the $swapdir is emptied at boot..

[Millennium]

From the look of it, he doesn't want to reboot. Uptime concerns and all that.

Deleting swapfiles is extremely dangerous. I suggest you not do it. The problem is, you have no way of telling which ones are still in use, and which might be safe to delete (or, indeed, if any of them are safe to delete).

Have you tried MacJanitor?