[Info-vax] swap and page files

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

(snip)
> Just want to point one thing out, in all this bickering.
> Run an OS X box for a month without rebooting, and it will be paging 
> heavily, and the results are much worse than an old VMS box.
> Todays machines (well OSes) are designed for regular reboots.
> The memory is used rather aggressively for disk caching, and eventually 
> you'll be out of memory, and your processes will be paging a lot, since 
> disk caching is regarded as a more useful usage of memory than for 
> processes.

I am reading this on a PPC Mac Mini with the full 1GB, running 10.5.8,
which has now been up 127 days.

It isn't the OS that has paging problems, but the web browser. Every few
days (depending on use) I stop and restart Safari. Then use the
"open all windows from previous session" menu item to get back where
I was. Safari seems a little better than Firefox in memory usage.

Much less often, I close and reopen Adobe reader.
 
> I hate having to reboot machines twice a month. (Or course, mandatory 
> updates means you often have to reboot that often anyway...)

Even my Win2K machine stays up months at a time. 

-- glen