Jaguar Virtual Memory

[mmcneil]

I'm even more impressed with Apple's implementation of VM - today I watched it remove swapfiles on the fly as I quit VPC (a real memory hog!!!). With VPC and several other apps open I got up to 10 swapfiles, closed VPC and MS Office and it went down to 5 swapfiles in a few seconds. Very cool

 

[evildead]

swap

if you have a deditcated swap partition on a second drive (not the same as your OS), you will see some even more proformace jumps...

 

[eyelikeart]

I've heard both sides of this arguement regarding swap partitions, and I honestly don't know which side to believe since I have yet to try it out.

I'd really love to see an article comparing exact systems, one with & one without swap partitions/drives just to see the difference.

Can anyone attest to both sides to give a more objective point of view?

 

[mmcneil]

Testing

I will be trying some testing on my 800Mhz tibook over the next week or so - the VPC test was just to see how much swap space I could get going - sort of a preliminary. I honestly believe that the performance gain with a single disk will be minimal at best - its greatest appeal will be the peace of mind of knowing where your swap is - appeals to those of us who have been using unix for a long time.

I also believe that a second drive will have an impact, just not sure how much. I'm still not sure how to get a reliable test. I have heard of a "window opening" application - that might be an ideal mechanism - anyone know of such an application?