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

[Vicki Schalin]

>  > 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.

Actually, the swapfiles are reused and/or thrown away by the system 
when they are no longer needed.

I have 896 MB RAM, so sometimes my setup needs lots of virtual memory.

Also some bug in finder causes it to eat LOTS of memory (this is not 
happening often but this _really_ made my life misserable some months 
ago), which results in everything else in RAM being swapped out, 
several swapfiles are created within minutes and when the swapfile 
area is filled up the machine crashes.

I was perplexed to what happened and forced me to reboot so often, no 
one on my regular mac-lists recognised my problem. When the computer 
crashed I restarted into OS9 and that's when I noticed that all 
memory on the system disk was filled up with swapfiles. So I thought 
swapfiles were my problem... I changed swapdisk to a very large (3 
GB) empty separate disk partition and that means that when/if Finder 
crashes I have some time to restart Finder before the disk is filled 
with swapfiles.

I also started running a terminal window with Top running, that way I 
can see how much memory is free and how many pageouts are being done. 
I can also see what processes are eating memory, that's how I found 
out the real culprit was Finder.

With sherlock I have seen that I at one time had as many swapfiles as 
over 30. But they were deleted by the system gradually without 
restart, so OSX can really reuse and delete old swapfiles. So the 
statement "the only thing that gets rid of them is rebooting" from 
above is not true. But a quick way to get rid of them is of course to 
reboot...:-)

Considering nightly janitorial work I must admit that I leave my 
machine on all the time, so all automatic setups are original. On the 
other hand I use my computer lots at night, so maybe the janitor 
isn't so effective? This I don't know enough about yet...:-)

/ Vicki
-- 
Vicki Schalin