03-20-2009, 08:44 AM

Hi there.

Hope somebody can help with this.
I have quite a new macbook and since 2 weeks Im doing 3D animations on it. I was only working with 1GB Ram, so my macbook used 2 to 3 GB virtual RAM - which made everything really really slow.

Now I bought a 4GB Ram Upgrade, so that everything is ok again.
--- Almost everything....
Some of most of the virtual ram space on my hard disk didn't come back.

The 3 to 3GB hard disk space were the last bytes I had on my disk - and I got several warnings that my disk space was used up while I was working. Some programs also crashed a couple of times.

So how can I get this space back now.
Is there some kind of disk clean-up?

Thanx & Regards
Martin

03-20-2009, 12:37 PM

OS X will use virtual memory no matter how much physical memory you have. The backing store (the part on disk) always holds a complete copy of all the memory that all your programs are using. If you upgrade your real memory, then a larger portion of the backing store is kept in real memory, but the total size of the backing store doesn't go down.

If your applications need a total of, say, 6GB of memory, and you have only 2GB of real memory, the disk usage would be 6GB--enough to store all of them. Not 4GB. If you upgraded to 4GB of memory, the disk usage would still be 6GB, but things would run much faster, since the odds of your data being in real memory would double.

If you're low on disk space, you need to address that normally. Trash anything you can do without, copy rarely-used stuff to an external drive and then delete that, or install a bigger hard disk.