How do I increase swap space in Snow Leopard?

Analog Kid · Apr 17, 2010

As an update: I checked the disk fragmentation and it was a mess, so I spent the day running iDefrag to clean it up. Turns out that wasn't the problem. I hit the same limit.

iDefrag is a pretty slick tool though, if anyone finds a need for it. ShowVolumeFragmentation is also a nice free tool if you're wondering what your fragmentation situation is before putting $30 into iDefrag.

I tried modifying dynamic_pager.plist adding -S 2147483648 which seems to have munged up something because all memory used was marked as "wired" and then the system hung. I'm guessing that if I override the file size, I need to explicitly set the high and low watermarks as well. A project for Monday.

Sorry DoFoT9, but I didn't capture the screen shot you asked for. Frustration set in after I hung the machine so I just shut down and came home. Monday (well, Tuesday for some...

).

DoFoT9 said:
is it for an assignment?

Project I'm doing at work. Push comes to shove and I'll add the RAM-- but I'd feel better if I knew what the limitation was.

DoFoT9 · Apr 17, 2010

sorry to hear that its not working! very frustrating

Analog Kid said:
Sorry DoFoT9, but I didn't capture the screen shot you asked for. Frustration set in after I hung the machine so I just shut down and came home. Monday (well, Tuesday for some... ).

thats ok.. no loss, just post it when you have some time

Project I'm doing at work. Push comes to shove and I'll add the RAM-- but I'd feel better if I knew what the limitation was.

well in all honesty i dont think adding more RAM will do it, and until you post pictures from the activity monitor i cant make a truely informed suggestion.

from a guess, it might even be completely skipping RAM contents all together and saving everything to VM.. who knows!

maflynn · Apr 17, 2010

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OSX automatically allocates swap space and there's no way for users to increase the swap files. The system allocateswhat it needs.

Given that you have 16 gig if ram and gave used 60gb of swap space and your running low in resources point to some other problem. Either with the app or how you have your data set up

Analog Kid · Apr 19, 2010

Just a note to anyone wanting to mess with com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist: make sure you set permissions to root:wheel. Apparently the system doesn't trust anyone else (as it shouldn't...) and just shuts down the VM system... Anyway, got it back to the original config.

Anyway, still no insight into the problem. Here's the screenshot I promised. 60GB of swap used, none of the other numbers look too wacky. Plenty of drive space as seen in the Finder window.

DoFoT9 · Apr 19, 2010

Analog Kid said:
Just a note to anyone wanting to mess with com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist: make sure you set permissions to root:wheel. Apparently the system doesn't trust anyone else (as it shouldn't...) and just shuts down the VM system... Anyway, got it back to the original config.

Anyway, still no insight into the problem. Here's the screenshot I promised. 60GB of swap used, none of the other numbers look too wacky. Plenty of drive space as seen in the Finder window.

damn man. sucks that you cant get it figured out.

you are using a total of 200GB of VM - which does sort of lead me to think that you may indeed be nearing your HDDs free space limit. do you have a 1TB HDD that you can steal from a friend at all?

how long does it take for the VM to be used up? when you open the program cold, and run your simulations (if they are called that?), does it use up all the RAM, then start using swap files?

Analog Kid · Apr 19, 2010

DoFoT9 said:
damn man. sucks that you cant get it figured out.

you are using a total of 200GB of VM - which does sort of lead me to think that you may indeed be nearing your HDDs free space limit. do you have a 1TB HDD that you can steal from a friend at all?

how long does it take for the VM to be used up? when you open the program cold, and run your simulations (if they are called that?), does it use up all the RAM, then start using swap files?

Yeah, 200GB of VM, but only 60GB of swap. I don't completely understand where that 196GB number comes from: 60GB of swap and 16GB of RAM should take me to 76GB total. My home machine right now shows 248GB as the VM size, but I've only got 143GB free on the disk.

I guess I should try to find another application that gobbles memory to see if I can trip the threshold with another app.

Analog Kid · Apr 19, 2010

Ganesha said:
You can easily test some of your hypotheses by customizing /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist and using the -S option to let you set the size of each paging file. Keep in mind OS X needs a block of continuous disk space for each swap file.

Any ideas how to do this without seizing up the system? Every time I've tried, I find that all memory suddenly is allocated as "wired" and once it's full the system hangs.

DoFoT9 · Apr 19, 2010

Analog Kid said:
Yeah, 200GB of VM, but only 60GB of swap. I don't completely understand where that 196GB number comes from: 60GB of swap and 16GB of RAM should take me to 76GB total. My home machine right now shows 248GB as the VM size, but I've only got 143GB free on the disk.

I guess I should try to find another application that gobbles memory to see if I can trip the threshold with another app.

i said previously in a post that the Virtual Memory usage is a cumulative total. some parts of the memory might be redundant, and even though thats the case it will still add them up irrespective of the number of "copies" of the same slot of VM.

that being said; i think swap file and virtual memory are separate things. ive never looked into how it classifies usage WRT those two.

Analog Kid · Apr 19, 2010

DoFoT9 said:
i said previously in a post that the Virtual Memory usage is a cumulative total. some parts of the memory might be redundant, and even though thats the case it will still add them up irrespective of the number of "copies" of the same slot of VM.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this... I think I got confused the last time it came up. What would cause copies of a VM page? Page in/page out accumulates how much you've used the system-- is VM size accumulating pageOuts * pageSize? That would explain how it can wind up bigger than all of my available storage, RAM and disk...

DoFoT9 · Apr 19, 2010

Analog Kid said:
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this... I think I got confused the last time it came up. What would cause copies of a VM page? Page in/page out accumulates how much you've used the system-- is VM size accumulating pageOuts * pageSize? That would explain how it can wind up bigger than all of my available storage, RAM and disk...

i am not entirely sure of the types of repetitions - but it makes logical sense.

copies might be created from multiple applications performing the same act over and over. who knows at what level and what viscosity it might be though. i am not sure of the "overall percentage" of these repititions - maybe its 10%, maybe its 50%?

VM size refers to a cumulative total each applications recorded VM use. if you check out the attached image - shown is the "shared memory" that i am referring to (where memory may be redundantly used etc), and im sure that if i ran calculations on the "virtual memory" section it would equal the VM size section (i hope).

nr9 · May 30, 2011

I am having the same problem, is there any solution to this?

manandrew · Apr 25, 2014

same issue on macbook pro 15" retina late 2013

I have exactly the same issue with matlab on macbook pro 15" with retina late 2013 running mavericks.
I have 500GB SSD (430GB free) and 16GB ram.
Virtual Memory reaches 80GB and then Quit Applications window pops out saying that I'm out of Application Memory

smithrh · Apr 25, 2014

I'd contact Matlab, that sounds like a horrendous memory leak.

manandrew · Apr 25, 2014

if you have read all section, it is not matlab issue...
it's OS X issue that it won't allocate more memory than 80GB.
this happens with any program that uses more than 80GB of virtual memory.
please do not reply about memory leaks, incompetence of user or so, as different people have more needs than just watching a movie and checking email on their computers and memory requirements are different.
I am simply asking how to make mavericks allow to allocate more virtual memory than 80GB.

DoFoT9 · Apr 26, 2014

manandrew said:
if you have read all section, it is not matlab issue...
it's OS X issue that it won't allocate more memory than 80GB.
this happens with any program that uses more than 80GB of virtual memory.
please do not reply about memory leaks, incompetence of user or so, as different people have more needs than just watching a movie and checking email on their computers and memory requirements are different.
I am simply asking how to make mavericks allow to allocate more virtual memory than 80GB.

That number really is irrelevant, it won't be physically using 80GB of storage and virtual memory. That's just ridiculous!

You can't tinker with OSX or the memory usage, however I believe you should be able to tinker with Matlab's memory allocations in the preferences. You should start there...

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