[X-Unix] Panthers Virtual Memory

[Eugene Lee]

On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 11:09:12PM +0000, Adrian Simmons wrote:
: 
: 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

Yep, this is the new behavior for Panther, which is not documented in
the included man page.  Worse still (perhaps as a side effect of this
new behavior) Panther uses more VM than previous versions of OS X (in
my biased experience).  You can still try "dynamic_pager -S filesize"
but I haven't looked at the source to see if Panther even cares about
some of those switches.

Solution?

	- Reboot more regularly.  This solution sucks in the long-term.

	- Reformat, and give the partition for OS X as much space as
	  possible (e.g. the entire drive).  This solution sucks because
	  it is painful at the start, but once done you'll never have to
	  deal with it again.


-- 
Eugene Lee
http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/