Deleting Virtual Memory

OS X will manage your memory for you. There is nothing you need to do. Stop worrying about it. 😎

BlakTornado said:

Ok, so I have 7GB of Virtual Memory (No idea how it got there) and only about 176MB of my REAL memory is being used... how can I get rid of my virtual memory and tell me iMac to use the real memory instead?

(iStat tells me this about my Memory:
Wired: 130MB
Active: 176MB
Inactive: 445MB
Free: 271MB)

Click to expand...

Wired + Active is your real memory in use (306 MB). Inactive is real memory that is being used as a cache of things you've used recently. It speeds things up if you use these things again. The OS uses virtual memory space to swap out things that are not needed now to make room for things that are.

If you restart your Free + Inactive memory will go up but your machine will slow down (until it starts using this space again). Unless you are having problems don't worry about it.

Just curious...what exactly is 'virtual memory'? Is it the sum of all of the resources used by that process that is located on the hard drive? So all of my 7 widgets use roughly ~380megs of VM each. I've found that VM usage seems to proportional to the amount of ram you have, my MBP with 2gigs of ram uses from 15gigs to 18gigs of VM. My old PB used about 5-6gigs with 640 megs of ram.

And is swap space the 'overflow' of ram usage onto the hard drive? What is the correlation between ram usage and virtual memory?

Just wanted some clarification. Thanks.