swap space??

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 1:25 PM -0400 8/19/02, Chris Ruprecht wrote:

>You will only notice the difference, if your system is running programs which
>actually use the swap space. Unlike Windoze, which _always_ uses it, no
>matter what, Linux and most UNIXes, except OS X, only uses it, if it really
>needs it.

OS X doesn't hit swap unless it needs to either.  If you thought it 
did because you ran 'top' and it showed lots of pageins, be aware 
that "pageins" happen whenever a program is run, as OS X uses demand 
paged program loading (as does Linux -- the Linux version of 'top' 
just doesn't report pagein and pageout counts).  You have to look at 
the pageout count to tell if it has ever used the swapfile(s) -- if 
it is 0 (and it frequently is, on systems with enough RAM), OS X has 
never done a thing with the swapfile.
-- 
Tim Seufert