site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com On Oct 8, 2004, at 13:41, Brian O_Neill wrote: True. Don't know the answer to this one. Regards, Justin -- Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large * Institute for General Semantics | Some people have a mental | horizon of radius zero, and | call it their point of view. | -- David Hilbert *--------------------------------------*-------------------------------* _______________________________________________ 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... Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that in Darwin 7.x dynamic_pager will create brand new swap files of increasingly larger sizes as swap demand increases. When it does create a larger file, When needed; you can review the code in the dynamic pager, which handles this, to see what "when needed" really means. I think it's a function of available free space and recent demand, but it's been a while... does it transfer the swapped pages to the new file, or does it keep all files it has created in use? The latter. Pages are added to available swap files according to available free space, which (obviously) comes and goes as the system runs. As the demand for paging space decreases, generally by having processes exit, more space gets freed up. Depending on other mysterious algorithms, the pager will "clean up" by moving pages from later, lightly-used, swap files to earlier swap files, and eventually remove unused swap files. Also, is there any function that will return, or a kernel symbol you can lookup, to determine exactly how many pages have been swapped to disk. The pstat command is supposed to have a -s option to list this data, but it is currently non-functional. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com