Should I restart if VM gets big?

[dogbone]

My emac has been up for 9 days with half a million page in and page outs.

1.5G Ram. 10.4.3

Everything is going along fine and I was intending to see what happens if I don't shut down for a long time.

However I've just noticed that the VM is up to over 11 Gig when it is usually around 6. There's 17 Gig available.

Under these circumstances is there any performace penalty for leaving the VM at 11 Gig or is it better to restart if the VM gets big.

Also why does the VM grow like this. Isn't 6 Gig enough to play with?

 

[Catfish_Man]

VM doesn't mean what it used to mean. To find out how much space on your drive the virtual memory paging system is using, go to the hidden folder /var/vm/ and check how big the files are. That, and the rate of pageouts you're getting, are the relevant factors.

 

[mad jew]

Nevertheless, a restart wouldn't hurt.

 

[dogbone]

VM doesn't mean what it used to mean. To find out how much space on your drive the virtual memory paging system is using, go to the hidden folder /var/vm/ and check how big the files are. That, and the rate of pageouts you're getting, are the relevant factors.

The var/vm is two Gig and has 6 swap files numbered 0—5 their sizes are curiously 64Mb 64Mb 128Mb 256Mb 512Mb 1Gig.

Don't know if this is good or bad but it looks OK, and cirtainly doesn't account for 11 Gig.