cestdelamerde.com - Comments

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

nospam@example.com (philou) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:23:58 +0100

I've never encountered any issue at boot time with this method, the only (big) issue, is when your system is running out of memory, the whole os hangs...

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

nospam@example.com (Yaggo) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:15:55 +0100

Interesting hack. I've 4 gigs of RAM installed on my MBP, but for some reason OS X likes to create big swap files (about 4 gigs reported by Activity Monitor). That efficiently slows down the whole system, as swapping to 5400 RPM disk is freezing slow.

While "unnecessary" swapping may be ok with fast desktop disk(s) and actually speed-up things, it seems that swapping in OS X is not really tuned for slow laptop disks. I'm pretty sure the system would still swap even if I installed 8 gigs of RAM (which is not possible, though). I wish OS X had "swappiness" parameter, like Linux does.

Anyway, this really sucks, because I know 4 gigs of RAM should be more than enough for apps I run.

Not sure if I'm brave enough to try your hack. Don't want to end up with unbootable system

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 !