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How many people have moved their VM swap?

Have you created a swap partition?

  • Yes, via mounting all drives and using /Volumes/

    Votes: 2 16.7%

  • Yes, via disk label method

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Yes, another method madamimadam does not know

    Votes: 1 8.3%

  • No

    Votes: 9 75.0%
  • Total voters
    12
madamimadam

madamimadam

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Just thought I would ask because when I recently bought a 120GB drive I started going around the office and setting up a swap partition on the machines of those who complained about speed and now they are in love with the speeds of their machines.

It is amazing how hard it is to find out all the details, though, on moving your swap partition and most people do not know how wonderful it is.
 
what happens if your using photoshop and
you run out of osx VM space (assuming you
only put aside 2gigs for VM)? Have any of
you used that VM switcher application? I don't
remember the name of it. I'll try to find it.
 
1stly, anything more than 480MB for a swap is usless in 99% of cases. VM works in increments of 80MB and I have never seen more than 3 which is only 240MB.

2ndly, Photoshop would not use much more VM than other apps but it uses a lot of scratch space which you set in the Photoshop preferences.
 
ive been under the impression that a dedicated swap partition hasnt really made any difference since 10.1 was released. maybe 10.2 is introducing that increase again. i'd like to see some benchmarks.
 
Welllll........

The CAD program I use fragments RAM like you wouldn't believe so it goes through Virtual RAM pretty fast just in creating temporary files. That and I spend a lot of my day switching between 6 rather resource-hungry apps....

I did a 2 GB swap partition just simply cuz it was a giant pain in the ass to get the OS X install Disk's Utilities to partition any smaller. I've done a lot to my G4 450 AGP to get all I can from it: Swap partition, Turbomem, Monthly Optimization, Monthly Disk Doctor, X.2.1, Permissions-fixed, Used Monolingual to remove redundant language sets, Installed a QE compliant video card.

Really the swap partition itself was minor as compared to the total sum increase of all the tweaks together. It just improved lag-time a bit and gained me some stability, particularly when using Classic.
 
Re: Welllll........

Originally posted by mischief
The CAD program I use fragments RAM like you wouldn't believe so it goes through Virtual RAM pretty fast just in creating temporary files. That and I spend a lot of my day switching between 6 rather resource-hungry apps....

I did a 2 GB swap partition just simply cuz it was a giant pain in the ass to get the OS X install Disk's Utilities to partition any smaller. I've done a lot to my G4 450 AGP to get all I can from it: Swap partition, Turbomem, Monthly Optimization, Monthly Disk Doctor, X.2.1, Permissions-fixed, Used Monolingual to remove redundant language sets, Installed a QE compliant video card.

Really the swap partition itself was minor as compared to the total sum increase of all the tweaks together. It just improved lag-time a bit and gained me some stability, particularly when using Classic.
Click to expand...

now that you have jaguar, oneof those optimization programs are actually unnecessary. jaguar redoes prebinding on any app that needs it when it runs. it also runs optimization and prebinding in the wee hours of the night, so those that leave their computers on all the time will probably notice an always snappy system.

i would still really like to see some benchmarks with 10.2 and separate VM partitions.
 
Re: Re: Welllll........

Originally posted by sparkleytone


now that you have jaguar, oneof those optimization programs are actually unnecessary. jaguar redoes prebinding on any app that needs it when it runs. it also runs optimization and prebinding in the wee hours of the night, so those that leave their computers on all the time will probably notice an always snappy system.

i would still really like to see some benchmarks with 10.2 and separate VM partitions.
Click to expand...

This assumes you leave it on all the time. I've found that it's actually LESS stable in the morning usually, though I gave up on constant-on 2 years ago as a pipe-dream....... I am a firm believer in the stabilizing factor in a cold boot.

Also: When I say ArchiCAD fragments RAM badly I mean that even in X.2 with a Gig of actual system RAM it still chokes up with using the Virtual RAM as cache for all it's various tasks; It's not exactly current code.... It's Carbonized, but barely... No Altivec either.🙄
 
Re: Welllll........

Originally posted by mischief
The CAD program I use fragments RAM like you wouldn't believe so it goes through Virtual RAM pretty fast just in creating temporary files. That and I spend a lot of my day switching between 6 rather resource-hungry apps....

I did a 2 GB swap partition just simply cuz it was a giant pain in the ass to get the OS X install Disk's Utilities to partition any smaller. I've done a lot to my G4 450 AGP to get all I can from it: Swap partition, Turbomem, Monthly Optimization, Monthly Disk Doctor, X.2.1, Permissions-fixed, Used Monolingual to remove redundant language sets, Installed a QE compliant video card.

Really the swap partition itself was minor as compared to the total sum increase of all the tweaks together. It just improved lag-time a bit and gained me some stability, particularly when using Classic.
Click to expand...

I understand the 2GB problem.... I found, though, with the 10.2 Disk Utility I just had to type in the size I wanted. I have 1GB because while I don't need more than 240MB in normal use I don't want to be doing something wild one day to find I have run out of space for VM.

I have put together the 2 examples below for interest sake. I have compressed the crap out of them, as I am sure you can see, but all you need to be able to see is which apps are open and how many swap files are there.

In the first picture I opened every file in my dock at the same time, gave it a couple of seconds to finish creating all the swap files and then took a shot.

In the second picture, I closed off every app, inc. classic, except for the terminal and the finder and took a shot.

The result of the second shot dictacts why I restart every morning. While I do not open every app on my dock every morning, I do use a lot of programs and notice that RAM goes "missing" and the machine slows down.

For the point of reference, I have 896MB RAM and when I start up with no apps bar Finder open I have only 1 swap file.
 
Sorry, just noticed that I have FCP open... I closed it and looked at my vm folder again and there was NO CHANGE.
 
Re: Re: Welllll........

Originally posted by sparkleytone

i would still really like to see some benchmarks with 10.2 and separate VM partitions.
Click to expand...

So would I.... that would be a big job, though.

You would need a min. of 3 machines that are exactly the same. One with no swap, one with a swap on the startup drive and one with a swap on a second drive.

I have mine on a second drive... just made sence to me.
 
Originally posted by beatle888
what happens if your using photoshop and
you run out of osx VM space (assuming you
only put aside 2gigs for VM)? Have any of
you used that VM switcher application? I don't
remember the name of it. I'll try to find it.
Click to expand...

Photoshop does not use VM swap as a scratch disk if that is what you are implying. swap is virual memory. If you run out of Real RAM, then theOS starts swapping. If you run out of Swap, then you move really slow and possibly crash. That is true of any system. If you dont make a dedicated swap partion, OS X will go out and find its own swap space and use it till it runs out. The problem with that is that your disk gets fragmented badly that way. I have a seperate partition as a scratch disk to avoid disk fragmentation from apps like Photoshop and doing things like high turnover file downloading, moving, deleting, edditing. I just newfs my working disk and no more fragmentation.


-evildead


PS... this is my 1000th post! I have been a user here for a long time. I dont post as much as some of the other users that have been here as long or longer than me... but 1000 is a lot. I dont know if thats a good thing or not... maybe I should find a new hobby....
 
Originally posted by evildead

PS... this is my 1000th post! I have been a user here for a long time. I dont post as much as some of the other users that have been here as long or longer than me... but 1000 is a lot. I dont know if thats a good thing or not... maybe I should find a new hobby....
Click to expand...

Nice work dude, congrats.

Maybe one day I will get up there.... I either have a lot longer to go or need a post rate higher than 2.4 per day to get there, though.
🙂
 
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