Quote: Originally Posted by
Rafster 
I think it's rediculous that when I have my Torrent tracker, Firefox, Adium, and Pages open, that when I look at my activity manager, I'm using close to 3GB of Virtual Memory.
I know FF and Safari 2.x can be VM hogs if you leave them running long enough. Usually quitting them and restarting frees up most of the memory, but not all. Apple drastically improved Safari's memory foot print with 3.0, so you might want to try it out over FF (I had switched to FF, but have gone to Safari 3.0 now).
I've had pages on my dual 800 G4 running for a couple of weeks now, and it's only using about 500MB between physical and swap so i'd say it's pretty stable. You might want to watch your tracker.
Quote:
1.2GB should be MORE than enough to be able to handle this using little or no v. mem.
That isn't really true in a modern OS like it used to be in the days of Window 3.x and 95. OS X uses the design of swapping out inactive memory whenever possible rather than stuffing the physical RAM full to the brim (Linux likes to do this). Each methodology has it's benefits, but Apple selected the best case for a desktop environment (I don't know if Server uses the other method or not) as the average user is only going to be using a small number of programs at once.
Quote:
I don't want to completely turn it off, because I know that sometimes it's important, but I want to limit it to only maybe 1GB or so...
There used to be a way to move the swap partition to another disk in 10.1 (and maybe 10.2?), but I haven't seen it since. This was more for performance gains (e.g. reduce contention if you were doing large numbers of reads/writes while also swapping) rather than controlling the size (though you could do that as well).
Jirka is right. Trust that the OS is doing the right thing. What you need to do is track which programs are eating up your RAM and VM, then complain to the developers/vendors that they need to improve their memory management and track down their leaks.
-dave
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