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philou: Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

nospam@example.com (philou) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:48:24 +0100

me too

davide Bertola: Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

nospam@example.com (davide Bertola) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:20:23 +0100

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.

philou: Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

nospam@example.com (philou) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:58:22 +0100

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.

Davide Bertola: Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

nospam@example.com (Davide Bertola) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:51:29 +0100

well .. and so what's the difference between your hacked dynamic pager, and removing it at all?

philou: Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

nospam@example.com (philou) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:47:08 +0100

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 !

dade: Disable Swapping in Mac OS X - Quick Update

nospam@example.com (dade) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:33:26 +0100

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())

philou: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (philou) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:39:46 +0100

What does not work ? the compilation of the code ?

xjust: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (xjust) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:27:17 +0100

does this work in 10.5.5 ? im getting tons of errors and warnings.

philou: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (philou) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 02:31:39 +0200

well... just try to comment the line 451 (the call to macx_swapon)

EasyNT: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (EasyNT) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:29:30 +0200

Hi philou,

Thanks, that's a really interesting approach. I'm running Fusion the whole day and my mbp with 4gb ram gets usually unnecessary slow because of swapping. Your solution brought a big boost, but unfortunately after a day it's slowing down again... Would it be possible to get rid of the last 64mb swap as well?

Jane: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (Jane) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:34:33 +0200

very helpful page...

CeKMTL: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (CeKMTL) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:46:25 +0200

Mon plaisir!
A bientôt
CIAO!
CeK!

philou: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (philou) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:20:15 +0200

Hi, thank you for pursuing the work !

CeKMTL: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (CeKMTL) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:04:38 +0200

Hi and thx again!

I've been experimenting, and doing some (quite) harsh things to my poor MBP 3GB...
I've modified the dynamic_pager on my own, and no swap is generated.

The system just FLYS!!!
Need to do some more experimenting and maybe try and fuse the 2 versions.

The idea behind is that once you overwhelm the system's memory, and before just crashing the system (coz of out of memory), the dynamic_pager starts swapping automagically.

when I have some free time I'll try to write this and do some more experiments, and hopefully let U know :p

Thx again for being the pioneer!
CIAO!
CeK!

Dan Kogai: Killing Mac OS X Swapping : How To Disable dynamic_pager

nospam@example.com (Dan Kogai) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 00:02:49 +0200

Thanks for the great hack. In spite of 4GB RAM I started getting swaps (maybe having too much fun w/ VMWare Fusion).

I wrote a Makefle to automate that. It fetches and build Universal Binary dynamic_pager. "make install" backs up the original.

http://www.dan.co.jp/cases/macosx/leopard/hacked_dynamic_pager/Makefile.txt

Hope you like it.

Dan the Leopard Tamer