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

[Eugene Lee]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2002 at 04:40:36PM +0100, Vicki Schalin wrote:
: 
: Actually, the swapfiles are reused and/or thrown away by the system 
: when they are no longer needed.

Yup.

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

Not exactly.  VM is there when there's not enough RAM to do work.  You
consume lots of VM only if you do so many things that there's not enough
RAM to keep it all in memory.

Of course, bugs from bad programming and memory leaks may eat more RAM,
and therefore more VM, than normal.

: 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.

Actually, "reuse" isn't the right term.  OS X actually deletes unneeded
swapfiles and creates new swapfiles as needed.  If swapfiles are there,
they are simply "in use".

: 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...:-)

If a quick logging out/in doesn't work, unfortunately a reboot is still
in order.  Oh well, at least it's not as bad as old Mac OS when you had
to reboot almost daily and worry about extension conflicts.  :-)

: 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...:-)

The MacJanitor stuff isn't so effective because all it does is run all
those cron jobs, which do nothing regarding the care and feeding of
swapfiles.


-- 
Eugene Lee
eugene at fsck.net