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Interesting exercise but silly to do
Authored by: chabig on Dec 26, '01 11:45:52AM

Sometimes it's fun to play with your system and see what you can do or make it do. But I am suspicous about these claims of increased performance. Here's why:

When you create a 500MB disk image, you are really just creating a 500MB file on your hard disk. If the system needs more memory than you have RAM, it's going to swap memory to the disk image file on the hard disk. Now this is exactly what OS X's virtual memory system does! It swaps memory to the hard disk. You haven't gained any advantage. In either case, memory contents are going to go to the hard disk. All that you've done by creating a disk image is generated an extra layer of overhead for the system to deal with.

Another way to look at this is this...UNIX virtual memory has been around for a long long time. Computer scientists study this stuff to death to find more efficient ways to do it. I think you are fooling yourself if you think you can improve on the time tested algorithms they come up with. Do you think tuning the VM system is not in Apple's best interest?

The best thing you can do to improve the performance of your system is to add RAM. At today's prices, you should just max out your RAM and forget about it.



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Interesting exercise but silly to do
Authored by: barrysharp on Dec 26, '01 02:20:12PM

I absolutely agree with this position.

If any swap config changes need making then do so by placing swap on its own small 1gig HD with it's own i/o data path.

Best soln is to avoid swapping altogether (not really possible but can be greatly minimised) by adding RAM -- problem solved.



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