[P1] filled up ibook?

[Mike Wallinga]

Thanks for the clarification, Eagle!  I guess I've been lucky deleting 
those swap files in the past... it's good to know the proper way to do 
it before my luck runs out!

Plus, if rebooting will eliminate those unused swap files, then that's 
probably *not* the cause of the original poster's problem.  Sorry, Don, 
I don't know anything else that might be the cause of that filled hard 
drive.  Hopefully someone else has better insight than me...

- Mike W.


On Jan 5, 2004, at 2:26 PM, Eagle wrote:

> OK, I knew it had to be there so I kept looking. :)
>
> See this macosxhints.com article for information on tuning 
> dynamic_pager to remove unused swapfiles:
> 	http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030712130414339
> Look for the text "Tuning dynamic_pager so unused swapfiles dissapear" 
> [sic].
>
> Cheers,
>
> Eagle
>
> On Jan 5, 2004, at 15:19, Eagle wrote:
>> I would recommend against removing live swapfiles, as you stand a 
>> good chance of hosing your system.
>>
>> If you have disabled swap on a file, you can safely delete it, 
>> because OS X will remove any live swapped data from them.  However, 
>> as far as I have been able to determine, OS X does not come with an 
>> application (be it command-line or GUI-based) to disable a swap file 
>> to allow for this.
>>
>> Another good solution, one that has been around since the NeXT days, 
>> is to just reboot when your swap files grow too large. :)
>>
>> Eagle
>>
>> On Jan 5, 2004, at 14:27, Mike Wallinga wrote:
>>> I don't know if this will help you much, but if you are comfortable 
>>> using the Terminal, this is one thing you can check:
>>>
>>> Mac OS X is pretty good at allocating virtual memory on-the-fly as 
>>> needed - it just creates another swap file on the hard disk whenever 
>>> it's getting low.  But, it isn't very good at deleting swap files 
>>> when they're not needed any more.  You can check how many swap files 
>>> are on the disk by doing on of these two commands at the terminal:
>>>
>>> ls /var/vm/
>>> ls -l /var/vm
>>>
>>> (The second command will give you the same information as the first, 
>>> but with a little more detail, including the size of each swap 
>>> file.)
>>>
>>> If you've got too many of these eating up disk space you should be 
>>> pretty safe deleting them.  Here is the  Terminal command that will 
>>> do this:
>>>
>>> sudo rm /var/vm/swapfileX (where X is the number of the swapfile you 
>>> want to delete)
>>> or
>>> sudo rm /var/vm/swapfile* will wipe them all out at once.
>>>
>>> I just did this to my iBook as I was typing this email - I had four 
>>> swap files taking up about half a gig of space total.  My iBook has 
>>> 640 MB of RAM; if the teacher's iBook has less RAM, it could very 
>>> well have several more swap files.
>>>
>>> Anyway, this may or may not be an answer to your question, but it's 
>>> something you could try.  Hope this helps a little bit!
>>>
>>>  - Mike Wallinga
>>>
>>> On Jan 5, 2004, at 11:56 AM, Don Hinkle wrote:
>>>> I was just visiting the local K-8 school, where they have a large 
>>>> computer lab filled with iMacs and other newer Macs, including a 
>>>> double-chipped G5.
>>>> Anyway, the teacher's iBook has a 10G HD but with nothing on it but 
>>>> apps, (i.e., no big video or photo files) seems almost full up.
>>>> It's running 10.2.6 (I think).
>>>> Seems as if I read somewhere about some anomoly in the OS causing 
>>>> it to look full when it's not really.
>>>> ?
>>>> thanks,
>>>>
>>>> donald henry hinkle