Re: MacOS X equivalent of swapon/swapoff?

The VM system can't be completely turned off.

However, the system pagefile is started in /etc/rc by executing the command /sbin/dynamic_pager with appropriate arguments.

If you comment this out then you won't have a "anonymous" pagefile for dirty pages.

"Flush to disk" has multiple meanings, depending on context. The most common context has to do with the update(8) daemon for flushing data from filesystem caches to disk.

The less frequent context is the one about paging out an entire process' working set. Mac OS X isn't going to page your program out while it's running unless memory is very tight.

What problem are you really looking to solve here?

You may find the "Memory and Virtual Memory" section of Apple's Kernel Programming Guide to be of some help in understanding the underlying VM mechanisms.

John Francini

On 10 Oct 2006, at 13:10, Alison Cassidy wrote:

Hi all,

Does anyone know if there is a programmatic way of switching VM on and off, similar to the way Linux does it? I've good reason to do this (honest!) and need some way to disable VM for the duration of running my app or at the least, ensure it doesn't flush to disk at the wrong moment.

Any ideas?

-- Allie
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	>MacOS X equivalent of swapon/swapoff? (From: Alison Cassidy <email@hidden>)