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Apple Computing Products:
macOS - Operating System
Virtual MEM swallows Disk Space
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<blockquote data-quote="technologist" data-source="post: 821817" data-attributes="member: 4134"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="technologist, post: 821817, member: 4134"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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Apple Computing Products:
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Virtual MEM swallows Disk Space
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