[P1] filled up ibook?

[Tom R. no spam]

OSX will always create at least one swapfile, size 80MB.  That's
the swapfile0 you're seeing.  With lots of RAM, you may never
have another one created since you may never need to swap
program memory content out to swapfile to make room in RAM for
some other program's memory needs.  Run top (type "top" at a
terminal window command line) and see what number you have for
pageouts.  Pageout means program memory contents had to be
"paged out", ie copied to swapfile, to make room in RAM for some
other program's memory needs.  A multitasking OS at work may be
swapping in and out constantly if there's not enough RAM to hold
all programs' memory usage needs.  "Page" is a unit in terms of
which memory usage is measured.  Paging in and out slows down
a computer, which is why it's good to have lots of RAM.

If more swapfiles are created, they're numbered sequentially,
ie swapfile1, swapfile2, etc.  You can see how deleting a swapfile
may mess up your computer's operation, since you're deleting
memory content some program thinks is in memory.  Important
system memory content should be protected against being
swapped out, tho.

On Mon, 5 Jan 2004, Don Hinkle wrote:

> OK, I went into terminal and put in the second commend, and got the
> following:
>
> Welcome to Darwin!
> [Don-Hinkles-Computer:~] donhinkle% ls -l /var/vm
> total 156256
> drwx--x--x  10 root  wheel       340 Dec  7 16:03 app_profile
> -rw------T   1 root  wheel  80000000 Jan  5 16:22 swapfile0
 . . .
> Eh?
 . . .