OSX likes swap when left on overnight

[ayeying]

So for a few days now, I notice whenever I leave my system on overnight, in the morning, the system would be laggy and slow. At first, I'd thought it could be the program with my 6GB ram in my MacBook Pro, so I removed it and replaced it with my original 2GB that came with the system. Left it on all night last night with nothing but Finder and Transmission running. This morning, I noticed I used nearly 1GB of swap and over 8000 page outs. I don't have any background processes running aside from the OSX defaults. Don;'t have quicksilver or whatnot. Dashboard wasn't accessed either.

Anyone have any clue?

 

[misterredman]

So for a few days now, I notice whenever I leave my system on overnight, in the morning, the system would be laggy and slow. At first, I'd thought it could be the program with my 6GB ram in my MacBook Pro, so I removed it and replaced it with my original 2GB that came with the system. Left it on all night last night with nothing but Finder and Transmission running. This morning, I noticed I used nearly 1GB of swap and over 8000 page outs. I don't have any background processes running aside from the OSX defaults. Don;'t have quicksilver or whatnot. Dashboard wasn't accessed either.

Anyone have any clue?

Are you sure it's not Transmission? Try restarting the mac and then leave it running for the night without anything running. That way you will be sure about the cause.

 

[ayeying]

Are you sure it's not Transmission? Try restarting the mac and then leave it running for the night without anything running. That way you will be sure about the cause.

I don't think Transmission is having a memory leak. I have well over 700MB of free ram. However, I will go ahead and leave the system on after a clean start tonight to see if swap is still being used up.

 

[bigandy]

Transmission is generally quite good for memory management - there've been times I've left it running without a reboot for 14 days+.

...but recently I have noticed my MBP enjoying page in/outs more often when it's more or less been idle for the night. The only thing I could point to is your RAM.

 

[misterredman]

I don't think Transmission is having a memory leak. I have well over 4.5GB of free ram. However, I will go ahead and leave the system on after a clean start tonight to see if swap is still being used up.

Let me know what happens. I am quite interested in that. I often leave it running too, encoding or recording programs...

 

[ayeying]

Okay, so I left it on with nothing on tonight. It seems that paging is gone down but it still used up 20 MB of swap for no apparent reason at night. I don't have anything connected except magsafe and I disabled wifi overnight also. It seems theres a small bug in OSX.

 

[yellow]

20mb?

That seems quite unlikely since swap file sizes are always in 64MB, 128MB, etc.

You sure you're not looking at the 2GB sleepimage file?

EDIT: Maybe you were looking here? (see attachment).

In days of yore, those were just numbers of page ins/outs, not sizes. Shows how much I pay attention, I have no idea when that changed..

Either way.. 20MB is not a lot of swap. Maybe the overnight log rotation is causing the issue if your logs are being spammed?

 

[ayeying]

20mb?

That seems quite unlikely since swap file sizes are always in 64MB, 128MB, etc.

You sure you're not looking at the 2GB sleepimage file?

EDIT: Maybe you were looking here? (see attachment).

In days of yore, those were just numbers of page ins/outs, not sizes. Shows how much I pay attention, I have no idea when that changed..

Either way.. 20MB is not a lot of swap. Maybe the overnight log rotation is causing the issue if your logs are being spammed?

I looked at the "Swap Used". It said 20.xx MB. It could be something as simple as logs, not sure.