[mAxximo]

I don't get this. Right at this moment I have 57,000 pageins and 306,000 pageouts with a 1GB+ total swap space after a fresh restart this morning. MenuMeters says that there's 516MB RAM being used and 1.5GB RAM free.

For example, switching applications takes years and using Exposè is really jerky while I'm rendering in After Effects.

Why does the system prefer to use the slower and disk intensive VM instead of the free physical memory I have available?

(I'm using Panther 10.3.9 btw)

[Detrius]

I know you are smarter than this. The pageout count is since boot. Data that has been swapped to the vm file isn't going to be paged back in until it's needed. Just because you quit the program that was taking up the extra 1.5GB of RAM doesn't mean that your swap file is going to magically go away. To make a case, you will need to do the following:

vm_stat 1

watch the first and last columns. If the first column is huge and you are still getting pageouts in the last column, then you can complain.

But it's not going to happen.