[macintologist]

Why is my swap space SO HUGE? and why do I have so many pageins and pageouts??

My uptimes is only 1 day and 21 hours.



I think this is really slowing down my 867Mhz 12" PB.

[Thinine]

Wow, that is a lot of page outs. You must of run something with major memory use. But page files don't really slow down your computer (the paging that creates the files might, but that's momentary). Also, are you running Tiger? It seems a bit smarter when it comes to VM use. But as long as you have the HD space, swap files aren't a problem.

[macintologist]

yea I'm running Tiger.

I don't know, it's weird. I don't do anything memory intensive, just use Safari, Mail, iChat, MS Word, and that sort of thing. No Photoshop, no games, nothing.

[kcmac]

What do you use to show these stats?

[Thinine]

MenuMeters

[msuper69]

My swap file is 5.45 gb.
whoop-de-doo.

Normal.

[JazzCatDRP]

I'm running on a 333 PB. I do all sorts of memory hungry things like photoshop, and my swap files at the moment total just over 500 meg. Sounds like something's not quite right. Have you checked Activity Monitor to see if something is hogging memory?

[d.fine]

Here's mine :



I've never seen GB swap files... and I can push this machine...

[JLL]

Remember that they double in size every time a new is made after the first couple of files.

[ShotgunEd]

Originally Posted by d.fine

Here's mine :



I've never seen GB swap files... and I can push this machine...

You've got 2GB of RAM, i'd hope you don't have too many swap files. The OP only has 640Mb, I'd say 3 Gigs is maybe slightly excessive, I was usually around 1.5-2Gig with my iBook with 384Mb of RAM under panther, haven't checked with Tiger.

[ursus]

I have similar problems. After say, 10 days uptime I reach around 11Gb of VM. Pageins and -outs are usually around 1-3 million. The thing is that I usually just have around 3Gb free space on my HD and when the VM is going up, it leaves me with virtually nothing left.

I cannot recall having this problem on Panther.

I'm on a 1,5GHz 12" PB, 768Mb RAM, 60Gb HD, Tiger 10.4.2 (fresh install, no archive) and usually running Safari (though lots of tabs), Mail, Address Book, Adium, iTunes, MS Word 2004, Preview (with a couple of not-that-large PDFs).

As the situation is now, I have to log out and in every 5 days to keep the VM in check. Doing that usually gets me half a gig of free space back on my HD.

Any suggestions varmly welcome, this is a bit annoying.

[chris v]

Keep as few Dashboard widgets loaded as possible, and also keep an eye on them in Activity Monitor for memory leaks. A few of the 3rd party ones have been reported to absorb gobs of RAM. On average, they appear to take up 20-25 mb of RAM for each one you have out on our Dashboard.

[Randman]

Run some cron jobs.

[Phil Sherry]

Stop looking.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by ursus

I have similar problems. After say, 10 days uptime I reach around 11Gb of VM. Pageins and -outs are usually around 1-3 million. The thing is that I usually just have around 3Gb free space on my HD and when the VM is going up, it leaves me with virtually nothing left.

I cannot recall having this problem on Panther.

I'm on a 1,5GHz 12" PB, 768Mb RAM, 60Gb HD, Tiger 10.4.2 (fresh install, no archive) and usually running Safari (though lots of tabs), Mail, Address Book, Adium, iTunes, MS Word 2004, Preview (with a couple of not-that-large PDFs).

As the situation is now, I have to log out and in every 5 days to keep the VM in check. Doing that usually gets me half a gig of free space back on my HD.

Any suggestions varmly welcome, this is a bit annoying.

With that little space left on your hard drive, you seriously need to think about removing some files to make more room available.

[Madrag]

Originally Posted by Phil Sherry

Stop looking.

that's a good advice!

I posted something similar some time ago, and because it doesn't really affect me (no real lag), I just stopped looking.

[ursus]

Thanks for the replies!

chris v: My widgets take up on average 200Mb of VM. I keep 16 of them running and they're mostly the ones that came with Tiger.

And yes, I should probably free some more space on my HD. Guess I'll have to go buy that 1Tb drive one of these days

Randman: I'm not too familiar with cron jobs, could you give me a hint on what I should do?

[d.fine]

The cron jobs are the maintenance scripts your machine is programmed to run at 2 in the morning or so. Which if it is turned of or sleeping it can't do. It is recommended that you run these maintenance scripts on a regular basis, like once or more a week.

There are apps out there that can do this for you if you don't want to leave your machine on all night, like f.e. MacJanitor, or Cocktail, and Onyx. Which one you use is just a matter of preference I guess. I like MacJanitor and Cocktail, yet use MacJanitor the most.

These scripts will clean out caches, rebuild databases, etc, just regular maintenance, but it should be done regularly.

[DeathMan]

Having a large swap file shouldn't bother performance. It could just be that you haven't restarted your computer for a while. It should release though, if your drive is getting full. The thing you want to watch is how many pages you're actually doing. That could slow things down. I only have 640mb ram, and its starting to become bothersom, after getting used to a work machine with 2 GB.

[cgc]

I'm sitting at 6GB of VMM swap files yet I have 1GB of physical mem. Can I flush the swap file?

[Cadaver]

Originally Posted by cgc

I'm sitting at 6GB of VMM swap files yet I have 1GB of physical mem. Can I flush the swap file?

Reboot.

[bergy]

I just installed MenuMeters ... it doesn't look like that ...

How can I check these type of statistics ???

[d.fine]

Originally Posted by bergy

I just installed MenuMeters ... it doesn't look like that ...

How can I check these type of statistics ???

You should be able to see these stats with MenuMeters. Enable the 'Display Menu Memory Meter' in the System Prefs, and you will get small numbers in the bar, usually green and red. When you click on these numbers you get a drop-down window where all these stats are displayed, like the screenshots posted in the thread.

edit : here's what it should look like :

[kcmac]

Thanks dfine

[MrForgetable]

Ouch.


i think i should restart my computer.

[spiff72]

Originally Posted by MrForgetable

Ouch.


i think i should restart my computer.

...and buy more RAM.

[MrForgetable]

Originally Posted by spiff72

...and buy more RAM.

once people will give me a gig of RAM for just the cost of shipping, i'll take it

[wataru]

I recently put a 1GB stick in my iBook and it's like a dream. They used to be more than $300, but I got mine for closer to $130 at Crucial.

[MrForgetable]

Originally Posted by wataru

I recently put a 1GB stick in my iBook and it's like a dream. They used to be more than $300, but I got mine for closer to $130 at Crucial.

i have a bunch of free RAM still even with only 512mb. i was running safari, itunes, word, adium, preview, photoshop at the time. maybe not intense editing in photoshop, but i was editing some photographs and writing a short essay. that's why i'm still hesitant to drop that much money for something i may not need (but nice to have). i'll get it when it drops in price some more

[jock]

use chacheoutX and delete your swap file and you'll regain your space, it will build up again bt perhaps not to that size.

[osxrules]

The reason that you get big swap vm files is that some apps are not written very well to cope with being open over long periods of time. Two of the worst offenders are the Finder and Safari. I have seen both use up to 512MB vm space each after just a couple of days. By quitting applications, OS X usually frees up this space pretty quick.

You can also run the daily script by doing sudo /etc/daily in the terminal if OS X doesn't free the space by itself.

Another thing I noticed is that Tiger uses nearly twice the vm that Panther did - no doubt why the minimum Ram went from 128 to 256. Under Panther, the vm of the kernel was about 500MB and is now usually 900MB in Tiger.

I leave all my widgets off too and drag them into the window when needed. They used 1GB vm space. Java apps suck vm so badly. Azureus uses about 1GB alone.

What's a little strange just now is that because my internal drive is failing, I'm using an external firewire drive and my vm is sitting at 128MB in /private/var/vm. That is despite the activity monitor reporting the vm size as 4.87GB.

I also have much lower pageouts on this drive than usual.

Still, activity monitor is very handy for seeing what apps are using too much space. It's handy to be able to view all processes in case something is running that shouldn't be.

[mAxximo]

As I was saying in a thread that was locked for god knows what reason (well, I have a theory), I don't understand why the system prefers creating huge swap files in my box when I still have more than 1.5GB RAM free out of my 2GB total sitting there. Menu Meters reports 380,000+ pageouts and a swap space of more than 1GB in just one day of uptime.

Why it relies so much on VM when there's all this physical RAM available?

As a result Exposè gets choppy during After Effects renders and when switching applications I have to wait out all this freaking memory swapping and disk thrashing. I don't get it.

[steve626]

Originally Posted by mAxximo

As I was saying in a thread that was locked for god knows what reason (well, I have a theory), I don't understand why the system prefers creating huge swap files in my box when I still have more than 1.5GB RAM free out of my 2GB total sitting there. Menu Meters reports 380,000+ pageouts and a swap space of more than 1GB in just one day of uptime.

Why it relies so much on VM when there's all this physical RAM available?

As a result Exposè gets choppy during After Effects renders and when switching applications I have to wait out all this freaking memory swapping and disk thrashing. I don't get it.

I am mystified by some of these postings. Each of the computers I work with (iMac G5, 1.5 Gig RAM 10.4.2; iMac G3, 1 Gig RAM 10.2.8; Powerbook G4, 1 Gig RAM 10.3.9) shows just a swapfile (called "swapfile0") of size 64 Megabytes. Sometimes these machines run for days or weeks, using different browsers (safari, firefox, netscape, even IE -- my wife insists on IE, sorry), MS-Office, Adobe software etc. I don't see these slowdowns or memory or paging issues, maybe I'm just not stressing the machines like others do ... One thing I Do NOT have are "haxies" ...

[d.fine]

Maybe that's because you're quiting the apps when you don't need them, while other people just close the windows and leave the app running in the background. Could explain the difference.

[__^^__]

Originally Posted by osxrules

Another thing I noticed is that Tiger uses nearly twice the vm that Panther did - no doubt why the minimum Ram went from 128 to 256. Under Panther, the vm of the kernel was about 500MB and is now usually 900MB in Tiger.

I've noticed this too. For some reason Tiger is a memory hog when it comes to file io.

[Darthmaul4114]

uptime 1day 20hours
after i installed my extra gig of ram

[Darthmaul4114]

*edit*
double post

[ReggieX]

Originally Posted by jock

use chacheoutX and delete your swap file and you'll regain your space, it will build up again bt perhaps not to that size.

Dont' bother, just restart, since deleting the swap files forces you to restart anyway.

[Detrius]

On Tiger, I usually have 2-4GB of swap files. I have 1GB of RAM, am running the server version, and I usually have a fair amount of applications open. Besides that, I know how to use server and therefore have most of the features running ( i.e. DHCP server, firewall, software update, open directory, web proxy, etc...). Under 10.3 server, I generally had 1-2GB of swap files.

[BlueIce]

Yeah, I reboot every few days or so, it just gives me a real clean feeling.