Comments on: OSX /private/var/vm disk usage http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/2011/12/16/osx-privatevarvm-disk-usage/ babblings of a computer loving fool Mon, 21 Nov 2016 19:37:12 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.2 By: jrwren http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/2011/12/16/osx-privatevarvm-disk-usage/comment-page-1/#comment-33275 Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:06:57 +0000 http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/?p=1032#comment-33275 hi Ben,

the man page for dynamic_pager says this about the low-water-trigger argument to the -L option.

-L If there are more than low-water-trigger bytes free in the external paging
files, the kernel will coalese in-use pages and signal dynamic_pager to dis-
card an external paging file. Low-water-trigger must be greater than
high-water-trigger + filesize.

so basically it is a reasonable size that tells the dynamic pager to cleanup after itself. It might be the case that your page file really is using all that disk and that it cannot clean up.

]]> By: ben http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/2011/12/16/osx-privatevarvm-disk-usage/comment-page-1/#comment-33274 Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:43:07 +0000 http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/?p=1032#comment-33274 Thanks for making this public. I just saw it a little to late. My vm folder had grown to 20GB and the remaining diskspace to 60MB. A restart brought it down to 5GB.

What is the number in the command? It looks kind of random to me. Could you enlighten me?

Thanks,
Ben

]]> By: Ali http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/2011/12/16/osx-privatevarvm-disk-usage/comment-page-1/#comment-32797 Sun, 18 Dec 2011 09:53:39 +0000 http://jrwren.wrenfam.com/blog/?p=1032#comment-32797 Thanks for this! You just dropped my /private/var/vm folder’s size down from 58gb to 8gb.

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