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Swap still being used even though I have 32GB of ram

macmee

macmee

Suspended
Original poster
Dec 13, 2008
835
1,110
Canada
Hi!

I recently upgraded to 32GB of ram (no I'm not crazy, it's just that I happened to get the ram for a very good price!).

I've noticed though, that in activity monitor OS X is still reporting that my swap is getting used. At precent I have 14GB free ram, 12.51GB inactive and yet it also reports that my swap file is 241.2MB.

I have considered completely disabling swap although I'm hesitant to do this incase it breaks something.

Is it okay for me to disable swap? I just want to maximise the performance of my machine with all this ram (I've already moved my application cache to a 4GB ramdisk so if there's any other folders I can get away with storing in a volatile atmosphere that would be great too).
 
justperry

justperry

macrumors G5
Aug 10, 2007
12,557
9,750
I'm a rolling stone.
macmee said:
Hi!

I recently upgraded to 32GB of ram (no I'm not crazy, it's just that I happened to get the ram for a very good price!).

I've noticed though, that in activity monitor OS X is still reporting that my swap is getting used. At precent I have 14GB free ram, 12.51GB inactive and yet it also reports that my swap file is 241.2MB.

I have considered completely disabling swap although I'm hesitant to do this incase it breaks something.

Is it okay for me to disable swap? I just want to maximise the performance of my machine with all this ram (I've already moved my application cache to a 4GB ramdisk so if there's any other folders I can get away with storing in a volatile atmosphere that would be great too).
Click to expand...

As long as you don't run out of physical RAM there is no problem disabling VM, it might also get faster, never liked OS X VM handling.
But with 32GB of RAM you won't run out of it fast, if it does your System will crash after getting less responsive.
 
B

benwiggy

macrumors 68020
Jun 15, 2012
2,382
198
Do you notice the effects of the swapping? If not, I wouldn't worry about it and let OS X get on with managing memory.
That having been said, I've got 16Gb, and don't have any swap used.

What is your Mac -- hardware and OS version? Is all this optimization really necessary? People I know who are much more knowledgeable than me on this subject have said that RAM disks are not actually that beneficial.

The best thing you can do is to get an SSD, if you haven't got one already. That's going to have a much larger effect than any other tinkering.
 
macmee

macmee

Suspended
Original poster
Dec 13, 2008
835
1,110
Canada
benwiggy said:
Do you notice the effects of the swapping? If not, I wouldn't worry about it and let OS X get on with managing memory.
That having been said, I've got 16Gb, and don't have any swap used.

What is your Mac -- hardware and OS version? Is all this optimization really necessary? People I know who are much more knowledgeable than me on this subject have said that RAM disks are not actually that beneficial.

The best thing you can do is to get an SSD, if you haven't got one already. That's going to have a much larger effect than any other tinkering.
Click to expand...

I have a 2010 iMac. I've looked into SSDs however I can only get SATA II, and quite honestly I don't know if I'm capable of upgrading my iMac to an SSD. The procedure looks difficult!
 
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