How big is your swap file?

[yudilks]

Hi All,

I just installed Leopard, Archive and Install.... But the system shows much more beach balling that it was with Tiger... SR 2.2 GHz MBP 2 GB RAM... I notice in the iStat Pro that the swap file in Leopard is only 64 MB and no page in or out... I just think that this might cause the problem....

May I know how big is yours? And anyway to adjust it automatically?

Thanks a lot...

 

[psonice]

Mine is 64mb too, with 0mb in use \o/ Always a pleasure to see that you're not using the swap.

Check to see if you've got free memory - if you have, there's no reason to use it, it would slow the computer down. I doubt it's the cause of your beach balls anyway, no idea what that could be.

One other thing though - activity monitor says my VM size is 45.34GB! What the hell? It's not actually using that much disk space - any idea what it could mean?

 

[yudilks]

I think I know why it only uses 64 MB on fresh boot... It's because Leopard utilizes dynamic swap file... So it can resize the swap file on the go.... After several restarts, my Leopard seems very responsive right now.... I hope it stays that way...

 

[Krevnik]

Mine is 64mb too, with 0mb in use \o/ Always a pleasure to see that you're not using the swap.

Check to see if you've got free memory - if you have, there's no reason to use it, it would slow the computer down. I doubt it's the cause of your beach balls anyway, no idea what that could be.

One other thing though - activity monitor says my VM size is 45.34GB! What the hell? It's not actually using that much disk space - any idea what it could mean?

VM is an interesting beast, because there are a lot of tricks that can be used to make one copy of the library appear in multiple processes, copy data in a way that the copy isn't made until you /write/ to the copy, and so on which makes the VM size look a lot larger than the actual RAM/swap used.

Pretty much every modern OS (Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris, etc) uses these tricks, but so far, MacOS X is the only one that actually spews info on it. I am also a bit confused as to why this information even needs to be exposed, as it just confuses users.

 

[psonice]

VM is an interesting beast, because there are a lot of tricks that can be used to make one copy of the library appear in multiple processes, copy data in a way that the copy isn't made until you /write/ to the copy, and so on which makes the VM size look a lot larger than the actual RAM/swap used.

Pretty much every modern OS (Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris, etc) uses these tricks, but so far, MacOS X is the only one that actually spews info on it. I am also a bit confused as to why this information even needs to be exposed, as it just confuses users.

Thanks. That makes sense... but I don't know why they expose it either, it confused me and I work in tech support. I actually assumed it was probably a bug. I know OSX likes to 'lie' about the amount of swap in use, my old powerbook likes to report 10gb or so when it's using a few hundred mb tops, but 45gb seems so excessive!

 

[mistersquid]

Swap files multiplying in number and size

I'm having a serious issue with swap files. They have been growing in number and size. In /var/vm/ : swapfile0 (64M), swapfile1 (64M), swapfile2 (128M), . . swapfile5 (1G).

I've been looking to see if any programs have a memory leak and the major culprits in VSIZE are Safari, Adium 1.1.4, and iTunes. At times, they take up more memory even than WindowServer and kernel_task. (I think Safari even took up more real memory than kernel_task at one point.)

For now, I'm chalking this up to something seriously buggy in Leopard. There are a number of lingering issues and I can barely wait for 10.5.1.