Turn off paging to disk (Memory Fix)

If you have enough memory to run all your day-to-day applications, you can turn off the paging daemon to prevent OS X from paging anything to disk. For me, this has meant less disk thrashing and more responsive applications.

Turning off paging is something I thought I’d never do. In the past, I was completely against it as I trusted memory managers to make good decisions. However, since using Mac OS X 10.6, I no longer feel this way.

Here’s how you do it:

Paging is handled by a daemon called dynamic_pager. Turn this off with launchctl:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

sudo shutdown -r now[/code]




When the system boots back up, you can free some disk space by removing paging files:

sudo rm -f /private/var/vm/swapfile*

After this you’ll notice a lot more memory becomes “wiredâ€, and memory is still marked “inactive†but it is freed straight away when other applications need it.

I use a tool called iStat and one of the system attributes I monitor is memory usage and by doing this I noticed a big difference right away.