Why So Mush

Well, I'm not sure what a lot is, but virtual memory is meant to keep your data available, even when you haven't used it for a while. It's always going to be larger than real memory, unless you don't have disk space.

It doesn't really make sense (to me) to have a drive just for virtual memory but a separate partition helps performance somewhat. You'll have to search for instructions on doing that. Increasing RAM until it's full is always a better way to help performance.

 

I'm from the PC side of things but how much RAM do you have in your system?

The OS shouldn't be touching a page file unless its running out of RAM. Better to put another stick of RAM in there and try and keep the OS from paging out then to purchase another hard drive. I think one of the few times you have a legit reason to do his is for apps like Photoshop and the scrap file it uses. Its better to offload it to another hard drive. *shrugs*

General rule of thumb for any OS.
More RAM == Happy OS.

 

Well, the thread title "why so mush" may not have inspired too many people to read more.

Get more RAM. However, the virtual memory of os x is much more efficient than the previous os, so it isn't terrible to be using it. You can speed it up by partioning a space reserved for it, perhaps, but I don't know any hard numbers to back that up.

 

As SiliconAddict mentioned, if you have enough physical RAM, the OS wouldn't touch Virtual memory, which is nothing more than HD space acting as RAM. On a WinXP system, 512MB is sufficient RAM to turn off virtual memory, although some programs require virtual memory no matter how much physical RAM your system has.

My dual G4 has 2 sticks of 512MB or 1GB RAM, but never looked at how much virtual memory Panther uses. Programs are running fine, so why even bother.