On Nov 28, 2013, at 1:37 PM, LuKreme <krem...@kreme.com> wrote: > On 28 Nov 2013, at 11:17 , list boy <i.am.list....@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Yep, double checked. Today's swap used is 39.12 GB, after 5 hours of uptime. >> >> (I should have mentioned initially that my physical memory = 4 GB RAM) > > Wow. I can't even imagine that large a swap. My laptop doesn't have that much > free space, even.
Once a browser has a page open with any kind of continually executing dynamic content that has a memory leak, swap space will keep growing ad infinitum. I have found the problem correlates more with certain web sites than with particular browsers or plug-ins. To me that indicates sloppy, even irresponsible coding on the part of either the web site developers or their advertisers. Two culprits: I avoid leaving YouTube windows open, and I don't go to Huffington Post at all. I once opened the JavaScript console and watched it scroll and scroll and scroll as a HuffPo page generated an endless stream of error messages. When my computer starts bogging down I run this command: ls -lh /var/vm On my primary machine, an MBP running Mavericks with 8 GB RAM, I got this just now: total 6422528 -rw------T 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 15:46 sleepimage -rw------- 1 root wheel 64M Nov 28 15:46 swapfile0 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 16:30 swapfile1 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 16:15 swapfile2 In the past I wouldn't have been surprised to see this list get up to swapfile8, regardless of which browser I used. (By the way, I'm one of those people with dozens of open browser tabs; I do feel it is a disease of some sort.) But Safari 7 is clearly doing something more efficient with memory -- something Firefox doesn't do, because I switched to it for a while and saw the swap space go up just like it did pre-Mavericks. A little while ago I went to do something on my other machine, an iMac running Mountain Lion with 16 GB RAM. That machine is usually very snappy, but it was being strangely sluggish, so I listed the swapfiles and here's what I got: total 52428800 -rw------- 1 root wheel 64M Nov 28 14:26 swapfile0 -rw------- 1 root wheel 64M Nov 28 14:26 swapfile1 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile10 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile11 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile12 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile13 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile14 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile15 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile16 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile17 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile18 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile19 -rw------- 1 root wheel 128M Nov 28 14:26 swapfile2 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile20 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile21 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile22 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile23 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile24 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile25 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile26 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile27 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile28 -rw------- 1 root wheel 256M Nov 28 14:26 swapfile3 -rw------- 1 root wheel 512M Nov 28 14:26 swapfile4 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile5 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile6 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile7 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile8 -rw------- 1 root wheel 1.0G Nov 28 14:26 swapfile9 This machine often has only a couple of swapfiles at most, because of its greater amount of RAM and because I don't use it as heavily as my MBP. I only had about a dozen tabs open in Safari, but one or more of them, I haven't figured out which, had been doing something leaky over the past day or days. I quit Safari and the number soon shrank back down to swapfile8. It pisses me off when I see these swapfile explosions. Fifteen years ago if you'd given me the specs of Apple's puniest 2013 computer, and told me a browser couldn't trivially have 200 web pages open at once, and that it would matter if I left the browser running for a day, I would have thought you were nuts. --Andy _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
