[X4U] Virtual Memory Usage

[Brett Conlon]

Hi all,

One of my users came to me again about her startup becoming full while she 
didn't have much that was open. I decided this time to open up Activity 
Monitor and noticed that our terminal emulation program (Macwise) had over 
870MB worth of virtual memory space in use. It's real memory use was 9+MB. 
There were other apps using large chunks of real and virtual memory but 
this one caught my attention.

Just to be clear, real memory refers to RAM and Virtual Memory refers to 
how much hard drive space it is taking (swap files) correct?

If so then I'll have to chat with Carnation software about the virtual 
memory usage of their app. I also noticed that it had over 117,000 errors 
reported (and was climbing by the 3's every second) when I brought up Info 
for Macwise. This doesn't seem right either.

To give the user back some of her disk space I quit out of Macwise and was 
hoping that the 800+MB swap file would disappear but her available disc 
space didn't budge. Should it have cleaned itself up when I quit the app? 
Is there something I can do in the future to clean up after apps like this 
without having to reboot the Mac or make all file/folders visible and 
locate/delete the offenders?

Further to the virtual memory question..... the user has 1GB RAM and 
Photoshop CS is set to use 75% of available RAM. We have Photoshop's 
primary scratch disk set to a 5GB dedicated partition called SCRATCH. 
However, Photoshop was reporting a 700+MB virtual memory usage in Activity 
Monitor. Would AM be smart enough to recognise Photoshop's use of the 
SCRATCH partition or is the reported virtual memory usage on the STARTUP 
partition only? If the latter, why would Photoshop then have a 700+MB 
virtual disk allocation on the STARTUP, when it has its own VM allocation?

Sorry if I'm talking in circles... the damn neighbourhood cats chose our 
house to brawl at late last night!

Ta muchly,

Cojcolds