[X Newbies] How the Grinch Stole 45GB of My Hard Drive

[Kirk McElhearn]

On 11/30/02 15:32, "Chuck Britton" <britton at ncssm.edu> wrote:

> I'm a total unix illiterate (and haven't yet found the reason the
> change) so this my be common knowledge to some of you.
> 
> Might the excessive swap-file thing be helped by running the nightly
> janatorial stuff? I suspect that a lot of OS-X-ers don't let the
> machine 'age' correctly during the night?????

No, the only thing that gets rid of them is rebooting. Some people have lots
of swap files generated; it's not clear why. On my iMac, I can get up to 6
swap files (which is 480 MB). I generally restart when there are more than
two, because it slows things down too much.

You can see how many there are with a free program called Memory Stick; look
for it on Version Tracker.


Kirk

      My forthcoming book: Unix for Mac OS X: Learning the Command Line
                     http://www.mcelhearn.com/unix.html
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