I think what you've found is an OS X bug.
I was able to replicate this behavior on OS X 10.3.5. All I did was
start the postmaster and then start a continuous loop in a shell window:
while true
do
psql -c "select count(*) from tenk1" regression
done
(tenk1 is just a test table with 10000 or so rows ... not very big.)
After a few thousand iterations I have more swapfiles than I did before.
The postmaster itself is certainly not leaking memory, and there are no
backends lasting longer than a fraction of a second, but the machine is
acting like it's got a problem. Watching top, I see the "free PhysMem"
steadily decrease to zero and then bounce back up to about 645M (out of
768M installed). Each time it bounces up, the VM pageouts count takes a
jump (otherwise pageouts doesn't move), and there's also a burst of disk
activity according to iostat. The cycle repeats every 45 seconds or so.
Meanwhile, the entire system has become exceedingly sluggish (opening
Safari is painful, for example, and even just switching front
application is visibly slow).
Yes, my system also becomes increasingly sluggish in the manner you describe as the swap files increase in number and size.
Time to file a bug report. With Apple, not with us.
I will. Thanks Tom!
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