site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=dk20050327; d=mindspring.com; b=iHcugVJDH2anFExl5ujulMmedL512Gkuwpk//UURXme8gQ7GX8n8owy1zwlYYWaY; h=Received:Cc:Message-Id:From:To:In-Reply-To:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Mime-Version:Subject:Date:References:X-Mailer:X-ELNK-Trace:X-Originating-IP; On May 28, 2008, at 12:36 PM, Thomas Backman wrote: _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-kernel mailing list (Darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-kernel/site_archiver%40lists.a... Page outs: 25MB (it stopped paging when I quit Firefox) Maybe that was a hint? IIRC some versions of Firefox are notorious for memory leaks. I can't use virtual machines anymore, and that's not the only problem, either... Needless to say it happens without them, too, sooner or later... :( You can sometimes greatly reduce the amount of memory consumed by a VMWare VM with one change: make sure the "Performance" setting in its preferences is set to "Optimize for Mac OS application performance". This option causes VMWare to request that MacOS X not cache disk accesses made by the virtual machine. Note that this option was disabled by VMWare under 10.5.0 through 10.5.2 due to a MacOS X bug, so you must update to 10.5.3. Along those lines... do you ever do anything like transcode video, or use any other software which reads large files? Many free video encode/transcode programs let the OS cache their input files even though they're reading the data exactly once. Such programs can put enormous dynamic pressure on the VM. Whenever some other process adds a bit of pressure of its own, swap storms are likely. Such software was a pretty reliable way to bring 10.4 (or earlier) to its knees. I haven't tried it under 10.5, and my understanding is that Leopard's buffer cache has been upgraded to better handle read- once I/O patterns, but it could still be an issue. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com