Re: Why is OS X swapping with inactive memory available?
Re: Why is OS X swapping with inactive memory available?
- Subject: Re: Why is OS X swapping with inactive memory available?
- From: Jonas Maebe <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 21:45:06 +0200
On 28 May 2008, at 21:36, Thomas Backman wrote:
Why is it swapping with 37% of my total RAM inactive?
There could be various reasons. One possibility stems from the fact
that "inactive memory" includes cached data, and it's possible that
the VM subsystem considers that all of that cached data is more likely
to be reused in the near future than whatever it swapped out.
I'm starting to seriously consider switching to another OS because
of this.
Linux, in my experience, indeed most of the time doesn't start
swapping until it really runs out of physical memory (with some tens
of MBs left as cache). The downside of this approach is that at this
point your system immediately starts trashing very heavily, because
there is next to no free memory left and a lot of stuff may have to
get swapped out at once (rather than that this happened gradually over
time).
Every approach has its up and downsides, since they're all just
heuristics as no single OS can predict with certainty what you will do
next. I you prefer the heuristics of another OS, by all means switch
to it (or file bug reports with Apple giving concrete and reproducible
cases, or do both).
Jonas
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