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raymondu999

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 11, 2008
1,009
1
Hi there.

I'm asking this for a friend of mine. Is there any way to turn off paging in Mac OS X?
 
I was wondering why would you want to turn off paging? What are you trying to accomplish?

Stop system slowdowns/hanging because of constant HDD seeking from page outs?

The simple solution is to buy more ram. Get a faster hdd or install a SSD or hook up a FW800 Raid 0 setup.

The link above posted is more problematic than helpful especially since everyone who said they got it to work in the comments said that that particular solution would eventually permanently crash the system.

Addendum: bad idea
 
But with no VM, you get hangs as the system waits for a different program to release physical memory ... or worse.

I am merely taking a guess at what the OP is trying to accomplish...hence my quote. And yes, that's exactly why a system would hang.

Addendum: bad idea
 
I am merely taking a guess at what the OP is trying to accomplish...hence my quote.

I know, and I was answering the question and adding to it, not directing it at you.

OP, disabling VM is a very bad idea. Don't attempt it.
 
Ah..I see... my friend's question, not mine. He's getting the Rev. B MBA, with SSD. Given that SSD's degrade in performance with use, if the system kept on paging/in and out of it, that would wear it down quickly, and he wants to avoid that.
 
Ah..I see... my friend's question, not mine. He's getting the Rev. B MBA, with SSD. Given that SSD's degrade in performance with use, if the system kept on paging/in and out of it, that would wear it down quickly, and he wants to avoid that.
Current OS'es rely on virtual memory to run smoothly.

While I understand your friend's desire, my guess is that it will probably not be worth the effort in the long run.
 
So some hackers tinkering with a critical but undocumented part of OSX believe they've improved on Apple's memory management scheme. The only problem is, this hack just happens to crash OSX. Don't try this at home.

Unless Apple comes up with a better memory management scheme, the answer to the problem of accumulating VM swap files is rebooting the Mac occasionally. (Not that I want to restart that debate, but here it is again in black and white.)
 
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