Allocate contiguous hard drive space for swap space?

[sammich]

After some messing about on my computer (short story:inf loop, loop writes to container in memory), I've built up large chunks of swap space on my computer. The problem isn't space that's been used up, rather the locking up of the system when switching to another application. Since the hard drive IO is flooded by calls, and that the swap space is invariably fragmented across the entire drive (iDefrag currently shows 2 1GB swapfiles: 984 and 3873 pieces).

When I went back to working in Numbers (1 400kb document open), I got a beachball for about 5-6 minutes while the app was being read back into memory from the thousands of bits on my hard drive.

Now, as my thread topic suggests: is there a way to dedicate a portion of the drive (preferably not a partition) of contiguous space ONLY for swap space usage? Googling turned up a few *nix related methods, but the link below has a stack of comments titled 'stupid idea'.

Can anyone break down the method (and why they think it's a stupid idea) in the link below?
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20011226102423514

Thoughts? Suggestions? Or is it just not possible?

 

[snowmoon]

I think you are over thinking this problem. I would start with something like applejack run in full auto mode. One of the things it does is clean up the swap files.

http://applejack.sourceforge.net/

Defragmenting is usually not the solution.

 

[Amdahl]

Mac OS will only use contiguous space for swap chunks. Typically, the problem is that it can't find large enough chunks, and a full defrag opens up large spaces.

A reboot resets the swap chunks, I believe.

The link you included may not be relevant, considering it was based on very old OS X.