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OS X 10.5.6 Excessive use of swap disk

W

wankey

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 24, 2005
601
296
This is beginning to annoy me... I have 4 gigs of ram in my computer, and it's using swap disk like there's no tomorrow.

It's only using about 2.08 gigs of the ram (there is 1.92 free) and it's already used up 2.2gigs of 3.0gigs of swap disk space.

This is highly annoying since I bought this ram for a reason. I am heavily using photoshop / illustrator at the moment, could that be causing the swap disk spikes?

How do I disable the swap disk entirely? (I have it disabled in Windows... and I've never hit the 4gig ram limit even when I'm making a 10 feet x 5 feet poster in illustrator)
 
wankey said:
This is beginning to annoy me... I have 4 gigs of ram in my computer, and it's using swap disk like there's no tomorrow.

It's only using about 2.08 gigs of the ram (there is 1.92 free) and it's already used up 2.2gigs of 3.0gigs of swap disk space.

This is highly annoying since I bought this ram for a reason. I am heavily using photoshop / illustrator at the moment, could that be causing the swap disk spikes?

How do I disable the swap disk entirely? (I have it disabled in Windows... and I've never hit the 4gig ram limit even when I'm making a 10 feet x 5 feet poster in illustrator)
Click to expand...

Can you post the output of top?

Disabling VM would be a very bad idea.
 
OSX VM Size usage does NOT matter unless all the free ram is used up. It's not windows.
 
Consultant said:
OSX VM Size usage does NOT matter unless all the free ram is used up. It's not windows.
Click to expand...

That doesn't fix anything... you've stated the obvious.

I will try to give you the top when it happens again... but here is the top:

Code: 
Processes:  87 total, 3 running, 7 stuck, 77 sleeping... 387 threads                                                                                       18:32:51
Load Avg:  0.47,  0.41,  0.43    CPU usage:  9.01% user, 10.81% sys, 80.18% idle
SharedLibs: num =   13, resident =   62M code, 2128K data, 4048K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 22967, resident =  751M +   25M private,  316M shared.
PhysMem:  578M wired, 1558M active,  875M inactive, 3015M used, 1081M free.
VM: 13G + 373M   11883835(134) pageins, 900005(0) pageouts
  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
32150 top          9.7%  0:09.95   1    18     30 1228K   188K  1820K    18M
32141 bash         0.0%  0:00.02   1    14     20  264K   704K   936K    18M
32140 login        0.0%  0:00.40   1    17     56  288K   268K  1100K    19M
32139 mdworker     0.0%  0:00.14   3    50     32  636K  5928K  2344K    32M
32119 Pages        0.0%  0:27.26  18   220    909   31M    37M    85M   567M 
32117 mdworker     0.0%  0:00.44   4    55     56 1540K  4836K  4356K    33M 
31457 MDCrashRep   0.0%  0:00.01   1    21     31  272K  2388K  1240K    28M
31334 AppleMobil   0.0%  0:00.10   1    42     32  816K  2388K  2768K    28M
31076 rcd          0.0%  0:00.39   2    63    217 1964K  8080K  5188K   344M
30932 Safari       2.9% 29:07.71  14   314-  3565  282M    46M   370M-  897M 
30415 Adium        0.0%  1:34.86  12   235    919   31M    29M    42M   503M
30217 iChatAgent   0.0%  0:00.73   3    77    166 1460K  4876K  2484K   290M
30079 iTunes       0.0%  3:37.00  15   299    961   29M    20M    44M   444M
29934 ntfs-3g_da   0.0%  0:00.00   1     8     20   48K   184K    80K    18M
29579 Unsanity U   0.0%  0:00.23   1    56     38  460K  7292K  1644K   292M
29377 iCal         0.0%  0:04.47   5   116    530   12M    20M    19M   391M
28260 Mail         0.0%  1:12.68  19   351    811   33M    36M    53M   500M 
24311 bash         0.0%  0:00.11   1    14     20   32K   704K   400K    18M
24310 login        0.0%  0:00.72   1    17     57   20K   268K   424K    19M
24309 Terminal     3.4%  0:08.34   6   119+   437 3556K    16M  9316K+  381M
23593 smbd         0.0%  0:00.00   1     8     59     0  1912K   148K    23M
23592 smbd         0.0%  0:00.65   1    17     58  160K  1912K  1500K    23M
17162 DashboardC   0.1%  3:49.27   7   124    312 8468K    11M  9600K   365M
17161 DashboardC   0.0%  0:36.28   5   157    314 8480K    11M    12M   360M 
17160 DashboardC   0.0%  1:06.29   7   161    729   22M    15M    34M   406M 
16808 Dock         1.3%  4:28.88   4   226    616 5352K    34M    12M   447M 
12158 ssh-agent    0.0%  0:00.04   1    23     33  284K   204K   544K    19M
11642 nmbd         0.0%  0:04.14   1    14     35  180K   220K   784K    19M 
 9775 DiskImages   0.0%  0:25.63   3   107    325  440K    12M  2888K   363M
 
I would recommend a reboot and then run "top -u" and just watch and see what are you doing when you see a lot of pagouts and see if you still have a large amount of free memory.

From what you have said it sounds like you are seeing this, but this is not normal the system should not normally do this if it still has a lot of free memory.

Also just because the system show a little "free" memory doesn't necessarily mean the Machine needs more ram, you need to look at the "active", "inactive", "used" and the page status together. If the Machine has been running for a long time it may show little "free" memory but this in actuality can be a good thing. as long as you don't see a lot of paging.
 
The system is thrashing the harddrive continuously. Page ins is 11.9 mil, page outs is nearlly 1mil...

Ram is barely half full and at most (at the height of my workflow) it hit around 80% with photoshop and illustrator working
 
wankey said:
The system is thrashing the harddrive continuously. Page ins is 11.9 mil, page outs is nearlly 1mil...

Ram is barely half full and at most (at the height of my workflow) it hit around 80% with photoshop and illustrator working
Click to expand...

I don't know... We need a Photoshop expert to explain how it handles memory.
It may have to do with it being a Carbon based app.
 
hhmm my guess is that PS uses the in/outs even if there is free memory. there would be a whole bunch of background processes from photoshop that you cant see so maybe they are using it all up?

what other applications are you running?
 
DoFoT9 said:
hhmm my guess is that PS uses the in/outs even if there is free memory. there would be a whole bunch of background processes from photoshop that you cant see so maybe they are using it all up?

what other applications are you running?
Click to expand...

I was running photoshop but not doing anyhting in it, I was mainly using a heavy Illustrator art board (a 10x5 foot poster with massive amounts of layers) that I thought was hugely slowing things down but the ram was still barely scratching 2/3 full.

The other programs include:

Mail
iTunes
iCal
Adium
Console
Pages
Skitch (background)
smcFanControl

All of which the ram usage was under 60% of the 4.0gigs in my computer.
 
wankey said:
I was running photoshop but not doing anyhting in it, I was mainly using a heavy Illustrator art board (a 10x5 foot poster with massive amounts of layers) that I thought was hugely slowing things down but the ram was still barely scratching 2/3 full.

The other programs include:

Mail
iTunes
iCal
Adium
Console
Pages
Skitch (background)
smcFanControl

All of which the ram usage was under 60% of the 4.0gigs in my computer.
Click to expand...

well that would be the thing then, the layers!!

using 13GB of VM, that seems pretty darn light. i use that much when im just browsing the internet...how much free HD space do you have?
 
DoFoT9 said:
well that would be the thing then, the layers!!

using 13GB of VM, that seems pretty darn light. i use that much when im just browsing the internet...how much free HD space do you have?
Click to expand...

I have about 80gigs of free space.
 
DoFoT9 said:
oh and dont forget RAM usage for PS is limited to 3GB of RAM :(

a fix can be found here (i think its a fix anyway)
FIX?
Click to expand...

Oooooh thanks

Actually that no longer helps, I have read the post and some later posts say it is no longer useful to create a ram disk.
 
Virtual memory isn't as simple as some of you would like to believe, so I'll give you an example.

Let's say you run out of ram. The least needed program you're currently using needs to have its memory contents moved to the hard drive to make room for the software you're trying to run. If the old program is using about 500 megabytes of memory and your hard drive is capable of writing 50 MB/s, you're machine would have to stop completely for 10 seconds before you could continue to run your new program.

Because we don't want that to happen, virtual memory is often pre-filled with the contents of your main memory, which means you can immediately wipe some of your RAM to make space, because a copy is already present on the hard drive. Of course, many different factors affect this behaviour, the copy isn't always up to date, it's only done periodically so your hard drive doesn't need to work constantly, but it should give you an idea of what's happening in the background.

Don't expect your page file to be zero bytes, just because you still have some memory left.
 
Not a photoshop expert, but I do know that PS has it's own settings for memory and scratch disk in its preferences. One thing that helps a lot is to set the PS scratch disk to a different physical disk than your OS install, that way the writes to scratch won't interfere with normal OS caching.
 
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