Hi Dan, Jerry nailed it and with that in mind, there's really no excuse not to immediately go out and buy a larger hard disk in light of how cheap they are. You should be running with gigabytes free at all times.
Ward Oldham On Sunday, December 22, 2002, at 12:43 AM, Jerry Yeager wrote: > Yup, you found it. OS-X does use virtual memory via the hard drive. > When you start up it looks at how much physical RAM you have, how much > free hard drive space you have available and then through some arcane > formula previously known only to alchemists decides on how much hard > drive to set aside as virtual memory. > > I know you hate the Terminal, but humor me this once... (smile) > open Terminal and type the command: > > top > > then hit return > > toward the top of the page get back you might see something like: > > MemRegions: num = 3220, resident = 60.7M + 9.20M private, 76.5M shared > PhysMem: 43.0M wired, 92.8M active, 177M inactive, 313M used, 303M > free > VM: 2.61G + 63.9M 9907(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts > > This is the virtual memory amount that has been set aside. if for some > reason, drive space is low, OS-X gets very cranky. (I guess the > alchemists didn't think about how cranky a machine can get, sicne this > was also the dawning of logical positivism). > > Side note: If you see the pageouts number getting big, that means your > system is, well, under stress as it is saving memory segments out to > the drive (another reason why you want to use the shutdown option > rather than turning the machine off !!) > > Jerry > > On Sunday, December 22, 2002, at 12:17 AM, Dan Crutcher wrote: > >> I'm still trying to figure out my recent problems with X (which were >> cured eventually by a reinstall) and I may have found a clue. I again >> experienced some of the same symptoms, though not nearly so bad this >> time. And it happened in a situation very similar to the one a few >> days ago. >> >> There are at least two factors that were the same on both occasions: >> I had booted into OS 9 and I had performed an operation that created >> large files that nearly filled up my hard drive. When I tried to boot >> back into X (this time 2.1.3), I found that my desktop was unstable. >> The icons and the date and time on the right side of the menu bar >> were flashing on and off; my desktop icons had resized themselves to >> the default size (I had set them at 32x32) and the dock had returned >> to its default size and it was no longer hidden. >> >> Before the operation that nearly filled up my hard drive >> (postscripting some Quark pages that had large graphic links), I had >> about 1.0 GB of free space (on an 18.6 GB drive). After creating the >> new files I had about 135 MB of space left. This was the case each >> time that I encountered the problem. >> >> This time my system seemed to work more or less normally with the >> exception of the weird desktop stuff mentioned above, so I >> immediately deleted about 500 MB worth of files -- and immediately >> after doing so, my date, time and menu bar icons reappeared and no >> longer flashed on and off. I reset my icons and dock to their >> previous settings and restarted, and everything seems to be working >> fine now. >> >> It appears that, on my system at least, OS X gets real cranky when I >> don't leave it plenty of hard drive space to play with. Any idea why >> that might be the case? X doesn't have a virtual memory setting like >> previous versions did, but I'm wondering if it doesn't reserve some >> hard drive space for use as virtual memory. I have 512 MB of RAM, if >> that makes any difference. >> >> Any thoughts on this? >> >> Dan >> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 3619 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20021222/87c04923/attachment.bin
