Moving the swapfile location to reduce pageouts, improve performance under Mac OS X 10.2.x

Our previous article "Understanding Pageouts in Mac OS X 10.2.x" explored the issue of unusually high spikes in memory usage, generally resulting in an increased number of pageouts, and therefore overall system slow-down.

If you have a spare volume or partition with enough free space, you can move the location where Mac OS X will generate and store swapfiles, in some cases increasing performance of your startup (active) Mac OS X volume. You can perform this task with a number of small shareware utilities, including:

• Swap Cop 1.1.2 (only compatible with Mac OS X 10.1.x)
• Swap Relocator 1.1.2
• SwapSwapVM 0.9.9b9

One MacFixIt reader writes "After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.2.6, I noticed that my memory became more and more occupied. At the end the only thing to do was to restart and then everything was fine again for a while. I have a QuickSilver 867mhz with 1 GB RAM and 2 hard drives (120 GB and 60 GB), and decided to try moving the swap files to a different device.

"I was stunned by the results. I had about 600 pageouts in one 2 hour session with just e-mail, internet browsing, iChat some writing in Word v.X and some game playing, but after doing using SwapSwap, I had zero pageouts in 24 hours of graphic work in Photoshop, InDesign and so on. [...] One thing I have to point out is that I had to rename my hard drives so that they didn't contain any spaces or special signs in their names."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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