How big do you allow your VM to grow?

[dogbone]

More often than not we need to do a restart for some reason or other. Or our system is chugging a bit.

But assuming that everything is humming along nicely and there is no pressing reason to reboot do you let your let your VM get as big as it wants to as long as there is plenty of room.

Or do you reboot regardless of need if it gets past a particular size. If so what is that size.

Also how big have you allowed you VM to grow.

 

[mad jew]

It doesn't keep growing infinitely. I've never rebooted to get rid of my Virtual Memory. It doesn't bother me. I just make sure I've always got the spare 8GB of free hard drive space lying around, and I'm set.

Just checked then, mine is at 7.8GB. It seems to stick quite closely to this amount.

 

[dogbone]

I've got 1.5 gig of ram in my eMac and it never seems to chug but I usually reboot by now as it has reached 9.6 gig already. Now that I've got more free hd space (cause I shifted the 8 gig X-Plane to my external) I'm going to let it go and see what happens. It's only been up for a day and a half. With only 2000 page outs.

 

[tag]

Honestly I never even think about it. I just checked and mine is at 7.67 GB. I'm not noticing any sort of slowdown or anything so I don't see any real reason. Though the million page ins & 720k page outs do make me go grrr.

 

[bousozoku]

Unless for some reason, it's taking gigabytes in a few minutes, there is no reason to care. There were problems with it until 10.3.8 but things have been steady since then.

 

[mad jew]

Just a quick note on page ins & page outs. It's not the absolute volume of page ins & page outs that matters, it's how fast they accumulate. It wouldn't be normal to run for a week and have zero of both, just as it wouldn't be normal to run for twenty minutes and have a billion of each.

 

[EricNau]

I've never even thought of it.

 

[dogbone]

It wouldn't be normal to run for a week and have zero of both

It wouldn't be normal to boot up and have 0 page ins

I'm just going to let it go to see what happens. I've never let it go past 10 gig before. I'm curious to see where it levels out.

 

[robbieduncan]

Mine is currently at 13.05Gb according to Activity Monitor! I think it's due to some bad memory allocation in a program I am writing

 

[russed]

not to sound stupid or anything but what is a page in and page out?

also, is there anyway of limiting the VM size? i know in windows you can, i just realised i have never seen it in os x

 

[dogbone]

not to sound stupid or anything but what is a page in and page out?

also, is there anyway of limiting the VM size? i know in windows you can, i just realised i have never seen it in os x

http://homepage.mac.com/joemikeb/ActivityMonitor.htm

Funnily enough my two swap files in /private/var/vm/ are only 64Mb each.

Mine is currently at 13.05Gb according to Activity Monitor! I think it's due to some bad memory allocation in a program I am writing

You win (for the moment)

 

[bousozoku]

not to sound stupid or anything but what is a page in and page out?

also, is there anyway of limiting the VM size? i know in windows you can, i just realised i have never seen it in os x

Thank goodness there is no easy way to mess with it.

Windows allows you to do what you shouldn't because the VM is poorly designed and often needs help to overcome its design flaws.

 

[portent]

Unless you're actually running out of hard disk space, why would you try to artificially restrict your VM size?

Unless you're constantly running a program that leaks memory, the rate at which you page in/out should remain pretty constant. And if you are, then the program is the problem, not your memory manager.

 

[russed]

wow... you learn something every day!


talk about learning, i should probably go and do some revision for my exam tomorrow!

 

[Lollypop]

Ive never really bothered with the VM size, just as long as it works! only restart my powerbook when a new os update becomes available.

 

[XIII]

http://homepage.mac.com/joemikeb/ActivityMonitor.htm

Funnily enough my two swap files in /private/var/vm/ are only 64Mb each.



You win (for the moment)

Mine is currently at 16.39GB. No idea why....

125202 page in.. 139268 outs.

Only up 1 day, 17:57 according to Terminal. Hmmm.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I try to keep my VM as lean as possible... one of the reasons why I disabled Dashboard... at the moment (with an uptime of just over 3 days) it's just under 6 GB. I usually restart once or twice a week, just to clean up a bit, even though OS X has become better at releasing resources with the last few upgrades. 10.4.6 is a world apart from 10.4.0-4, when I actually had to reboot every day, because HD space was more or less eaten up (and I had very little HD space left typically around 6 GB just after a reboot), especially when doing heavy stuff, like ripping CDs or working in Photoshop...

Better now, I've cleaned up a bit (got an external drive which made it possible to clean up a bit, now I have ~10 GB free after a reboot) and that, along with 10.4.6's improved ability to just let go () has made my iBook a happy little machine...