Panthers Virtual Memory

[Adrian Simmons]

Hello

Can't find any relevant info googling so maybe you guys can help out...

I recently upgraded to Panther, and as with jaguar chose to create a
separate swap partition. I, like many other people it seems, are seeing
panther eating through swap space much faster than Jaguar did.

I've moved my swap to a different partition as described here;
<http://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/OSX/swapfile/index.html>
Everything has been fine, except twice now I've found myself running out
of space.

What I've found weird, and what I'm asking about is the size of the vm
files Panther creates. Jaguar just went up in 80mb chunks - jaguar
doesn't seem to do that, right now /volumes/swap/.vm contains:

-rw------T   1 root  wheel        64M 25 Mar 15:59 swapfile0
-rw------T   1 root  wheel        64M 25 Mar 16:15 swapfile1
-rw------T   1 root  wheel       128M 25 Mar 16:41 swapfile2
-rw------T   1 root  wheel       256M 25 Mar 16:41 swapfile3
-rw------T   1 root  wheel       512M 25 Mar 22:07 swapfile4

So it seems the files Panther is adding increase in size!
This is not a good combination with my 2Gb swap partition, it's only 81%
full, with near 400mb still to fill and yet panther complains that the
disk is 'full'. Clearly it's tried to add either another 512mb swapfile,
or most probably a gigabyte sized swapfile!

Presumably it would go on to add 2 gig, 4gig, 8gig and so on
exponentially increasing the swapfile size...

Anybody else seen this and know if the behavior can be tweaked?

Adrian