Moving the swapdir in OS X 10.2.x

G

gatorparrots

Guest
Many techniques were developed for moving the swap directory in OS X 10.1.x and several applications were even written for that expressed purposes. None of those techniques or applications work very cleanly in OS X 10.2.x (resulting in .vm 1 or duplicate mounts and other oddities); but that's okay, because moving the swap file in Jaguar is easier than it has ever been. [No fstabs, no StartupItems, etc.]. This technique merely requires the editing of a single system file to make the configuration change.

The first step is to back up your /etc/rc, as we will be editing it and want to preserve a backup copy to fallback on in case things go awry:
sudo cp -p /etc/rc /etc/rc.default

Here is the relevant latter half of /etc/rc, which is all that needs to be edited to move the swap location in Jaguar:
##
# update flushes the cached blocks from the filesystem using
# the sync system call every 30 seconds.  This ensures the
# disk is reasonably up-to-date in the event of a system crash.
##

update

##
# Start the virtual memory system.
##

ConsoleMessage "Starting virtual memory"

swapdir=/private/var/vm
if [ "${netboot}" = "1" ]; then
   sh /etc/rc.netboot setup_vm ${swapdir}
fi

# Make sure the swapfile exists
if [ ! -d ${swapdir} ]; then
   ConsoleMessage "Creating default swap directory"
   mount -uw /
   mkdir -p -m 755 ${swapdir}
   chown root:wheel ${swapdir}
else
   rm -rf ${swapdir}/swap*
fi
                   
dynamic_pager -H 40000000 -L 160000000 -S 80000000 -F ${swapdir}/swapfile



##
# Start daemon to fix incorrectly-prebound binaries
##
   if [ -x /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding ]; then
       /usr/libexec/fix_prebinding
   fi


##
# Clean up and reset files and devices.
##
. /etc/rc.cleanup


##
# Early start for any startup items for performance reasons
##
configd


##
# pre-heat support for working set profiles
##
appprofiledir=/private/var/vm/app_profile

if [ ! -d ${appprofiledir} ]; then
       if [ -f  ${appprofiledir} ]; then
               mv -f ${appprofiledir} "${appprofiledir}_"
       fi
       mkdir -p -m 711 ${appprofiledir}
       chown root:wheel ${appprofiledir}
fi


##
# Insert BootCache prefetch tag
##
if [  "${SafeBoot}" != "-x" -a -x "${BootCacheControl}" ]; then
   ${BootCacheControl} tag
fi



##
# Start System Services
##

# Set language from CDIS.custom - assumes this is parse-able by sh
. /var/log/CDIS.custom
export LANGUAGE

SystemStarter -g ${VerboseFlag} ${SafeBoot}

exit 0
You might think that changing swapdir=/private/var/vm is all you need to do, but of course Apple didn't make it that easy on us! Not only do you have to change the location of the swapdir by changing the argument, but you also have to move the relevant VM section to the end, just before the exit 0, in order to allow for the pre-heat and other essential sections to run first; also we'll add a mount -a command for an extra margin of safety, just before establishing the swap location (in the example below, the swap directory is moved to a separate partition, /Volumes/.vm:
##
# pre-heat support for working set profiles
##
appprofiledir=/private/var/vm/app_profile

if [ ! -d ${appprofiledir} ]; then
       if [ -f  ${appprofiledir} ]; then
               mv -f ${appprofiledir} "${appprofiledir}_"
       fi
       mkdir -p -m 711 ${appprofiledir}
       chown root:wheel ${appprofiledir}
fi

##
# Insert BootCache prefetch tag
##
if [  "${SafeBoot}" != "-x" -a -x "${BootCacheControl}" ]; then
   ${BootCacheControl} tag
fi

##
# Start System Services
##

# Set language from CDIS.custom - assumes this is parse-able by sh
. /var/log/CDIS.custom
export LANGUAGE

SystemStarter -g ${VerboseFlag} ${SafeBoot}

##
# Start the virtual memory system.
##  
   
ConsoleMessage "Starting virtual memory"
 
swapdir=/Volumes/.vm
if [ "${netboot}" = "1" ]; then
   sh /etc/rc.netboot setup_vm ${swapdir}
fi

# Make sure the swapfile exists
if [ ! -d ${swapdir} ]; then
   ConsoleMessage "Creating default swap directory"
   mount -uw /
   mkdir -p -m 755 ${swapdir}
   chown root:wheel ${swapdir}
else
   rm -rf ${swapdir}/swap*
fi
 
dynamic_pager -H 40000000 -L 160000000 -S 80000000 -F ${swapdir}/swapfile


exit 0
(If you're very daring, you can try out different pager settings, but I don't necessarily recommend it, unless you are trying to squeeze every drop of performance out of a server machine or something. Apple has given us good general defaults in this regard. Change them at your own risk.)

Upon the next reboot, first confirm that the volume has mounted successfully with df:

gatorparrots% df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2          40018068  31444868   8317200  79% /
devfs                        1         1         0 100% /dev
fdesc                        1         1         0 100% /dev
<volfs>                    512       512         0 100% /.vol
/dev/disk2s9           9424512    172944   9251568   2% /Volumes/.vm
And then run an ls /Volumes/.vm for good measure to confirm the swapfiles are being written to that partition:

gatorparrots% ls /Volumes/.vm
total 78136
   0 drwxrwxrwx   9 gator    staff         306 Jan 19 13:07 ./
   0 drwxrwxrwt   7 root     wheel         238 Jan 19 16:58 ../
   0 d-wx-wx-wx   3 root     staff         102 Dec 26 13:01 .Trashes/
   4 -rw-r--r--   1 root     staff        1024 Dec 26 13:00 Desktop DB
   4 -rw-r--r--   1 root     staff           2 Dec 26 12:59 Desktop DF
   0 drwxrwxrwt   4 gator    staff         136 Jan  9 14:54 Temporary Items/
78128 -rw------T   1 root     staff    80000000 Jan 19 13:07 swapfile0
If everything looks good, you should be able to sudo rm -f /private/var/vm/swap* to clear the old swap files.
 
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What does this do actually...

Should I be able to see a speed increase from this if I only have one drive installed but partitioned into 2 drives in my iMac?
 

rman


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I am not sure the affect this has on OS X, but in other unix environment it is better to have the swap partition on other disk drive. This would give you better performance. The reason why you would increase the swap space, it due to limited amount memory.
 
OP
G

gatorparrots

Guest
Swapfiles are created 80MB at a time by the system, and only when needed. If these are written to the same disk as everything else, your main disk will become fragmented after significant use (even though the swap files are cleared with a reboot, they leave behind an 80MB 'hole' that often is not filled on your disk). Further, if the free space on your drive does not occur in 80MB chunks (i.e. different block allocation size), your swapfiles will have to be fragmented. This will increase the amount of seek time when your system starts to page data between RAM and disk -- when you run out of 'real' RAM, you will notice a significant decrease in performance.

It is most advantageous if you can dedicate an entire hard drive as a swap disk. Failing that, a second partition (preferably the first partition on the disk for fastest access) is acceptable. This way you can access data faster if you're getting it from two disks -- while the system is paging data between RAM and hard disk, you downloads to another disk or application launch or large file read isn't taking a big performance hit. This dedicated disk/partition doesn't have to be very large, 500MB to 1GB should be plenty. An old SCSI drive would be ideal because they're fast (assuming you can get it to work with OS X). Failing that, a 2 or 4GB IDE drive would do the trick.
 
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Moving swap on intel iMac with osx version 10.4.8

How would I go about changing the swap file to a different directory on an Intel iMac. I'm currently running osx version 10.4.8 with the latest updates.

thanks
 

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