What creates lots of swapfiles?

[nelly22]

I have now daily "Your disk is almost full" messages and i can see in private/var/vm folder has sleepimage 1.07gb and 10 swapfiles 1.07gb.

If i read it right, Activity Monitor don't show anything odd, highest memory usage is Waterfox uses 1,3gb and Waterfox CP Web Content 1,9gb.

Swapfiles disappear after awhile.

How i can find out what causes this?

 

[HDFan]

Need more data from Activity Monitor



and Finder: how large is your boot disk, how much is used?

 

[Fishrrman]

Please tell us which Mac you are using.
How much RAM is in it?
How large is the internal drive?

If it was me, I'd try:
1. Disable the sleep image.
2. Disable VM disk swapping.
3. Then, delete the sleep image and VM swap files.

Both can be done via the terminal, and I've done both of these on my personal Macs.

Works fine for me with 10gb of installed RAM.
No crashes -- works fine.
But then again, I don't load it up with "lots of apps at once", nor do I keep 15-20 tabs open in Safari all the time (who would need to do that?).

 

[nelly22]

When MBPR works okay: physical memory 8gb, memory used 6,69gb, cached files 1,4gb, swap used 332mb, app memory 2.5gb wired memory 1.9gb, compressed 2.2gb. Boot disk is 121gb used 108gb.

I been waiting it happening again so i could post these numbers when it is happening.

 

[gsahli]

I think it means exactly what it says - your disk IS almost full. 108 GB out of 121 GB. You need another 10 GB or more of storage/drive space for "normal" operation. Every time Mac OS reads/writes/opens an app/changes windows/etc, it uses drive space as temp storage. Your Mac is working overtime managing that.
Move something off the drive or get a bigger drive.

 

[Fishrrman]

13gb of free space "is enough".
Again, I'd TURN OFF the hibernation mode.
And try turning off VM disk swapping (at least temporarily) to see if that helps.