Swap space?

[d4m1r]

I know how paging/swap work both within Windows and linux respectively, but I'm new to OS X....So experts, does it just offload things that are not active/needed from RAM to HDD? On systems with 8GB of RAM, I have personally witnessed the benefits of keeping stuff in RAM as it is obviously faster than a traditional HDD, even in this case as my MBP has an SSD.

Will it just keep more things in RAM meaning my RAM usage will consistently be high if I've got a lot of applications open? I would actually prefer that and while I have read some users posting their system is a lot more unstable when they disabled swap, those cases sounded like user error rather than anything else...

 

[duervo]

This is probably more than you're looking for, but here's an in depth explanation of virtual memory in OS X:

https://developer.apple.com/library...tual/ManagingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.html

This helps to explain what the memory-related metrics mean in OS X's Activity Monitor:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342

 

[GGJstudios]

The only thing you need to watch for is page outs, as OS X manages memory automatically. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used

 

[d4m1r]

This is probably more than you're looking for, but here's an in depth explanation of virtual memory in OS X:

https://developer.apple.com/library...tual/ManagingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.html

This helps to explain what the memory-related metrics mean in OS X's Activity Monitor:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342

Thanks for the links! Seems it works in a similar fashion to linux based swap space, but I will be monitoring my RAM usage first before I decide how to proceed...I prefer to have as much things in memory as possible, so if it is not swapping a lot, I'll just leave it be in lieu of potential stability issues.