Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

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Posted by philou on Friday, March 7. 2008 at 18:27

Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

I'm running my new dynamic_pager during last 3 days, I've not noticed any bad side effects : here is my vm_stats output after 20hours uptime, heavy memory and disk usage :

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 67541.
Pages active: 336302.
Pages inactive: 58724.
Pages wired down: 59391.
"Translation faults": 13792984.
Pages copy-on-write: 63882.
Pages zero filled: 12479434.
Pages reactivated: 31.
Pageins: 55306.
Pageouts: 0.
Object cache: 12432 hits of 155686 lookups (7% hit rate)


The kernel does not writes pages to the swap anymore (0 pageouts). The amount of inactive memory used is exceptionnally low for such a high amount of active memory (1312Mb active, 229Mb inactive). The single swap file of 64Mb is not used : I'm owning my Macbook Pro since december 2006 and I only seen this right after a reboot of the system.

I'm not sure everything described above are the result of my dynamic_pager hack, but it damn works !
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you should try to create a program that allocates the whole memory and see what happenso
something like (python)

class foo:
string="JUST A STRING"
list =[]
while 1:
list.append(foo())
#1 dade (Homepage) on 2008-11-04 09:33 (Reply)
With the hacked dynamic_pager, you do not want to do that ;-)

Allocating the whole memory freezes the system as the xnu kernel does not handle out of memory error (yeah that's the worst piece of crap I ever seen) it always try to tell dynamic_pager to allocate more swap...

I do not have the need to run python script to see that, running some fat buggy applications like Adobe Photoshop hangs the mac.

Anyway, I will never go back on this, hacking dynamic_pager just make the mac usable !
#1.1 philou on 2008-11-04 09:47 (Reply)
well .. and so what's the difference between your hacked dynamic pager, and removing it at all?
#2 Davide Bertola (Homepage) on 2008-11-04 18:51 (Reply)
I've seen a strange thing happening when removing the dynamic_pager executable from the filesystem : my mac has 2Gb of ram installed in the system, and only 1gb the ram was really used. I was not able to go beyond this limit. That's why I've hacked this piece of software.
#2.1 philou on 2008-11-04 19:58 (Reply)
I'm guessing it was random.
I'm using a macbook and i moved dynamic_pager away. The system works and uses whole memory (2 gigs). My problem is the hanging. I'd prefer an app closing with an "out of memory" error.
#2.1.1 davide Bertola (Homepage) on 2008-11-04 20:20 (Reply)
me too :-)
#2.1.1.1 philou on 2008-11-04 21:48 (Reply)

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