[CUBE] Pussy Code optimisation

[Todd Masco]

John Allan wrote:
> X does really weird things with interneting ... Try browsing for a few
> minutes and watch you HD lose 3 GB ... Download a 176k shareware and 
> lose
> 100MB ... What the hell is going on in there?

Let me guess, you don't have all that much RAM, or you're running a few 
RAM-heavy apps.

What I'm guessing is going on is that your dynamic swap file is 
growing.  See, all of Mac OS X uses virtual memory -- it uses a file on 
your disk to write things when there isn't enough RAM.  That file will 
grow as necessary to accommodate what you're doing.  Browsers use RAM 
to store more pages, and StuffIt grabs a bunch of RAM to do the 
decompression of the file.  The RAM isn't there, so the file grows.

Inside a shell, look for a file called "/private/var/vm/swapfile0" -- 
if it's growing, that's what is going on and you should get more RAM if 
you can.  Everything will run much, much faster...

HTH,

	-- Todd