Help?

[fox_c]

How do I find out what processes are using the swap space on my mac? My istat pro widget shows 1.7 gig in swap and I'm told this is silly. raayat has been trying to help me (Thank you!), but is somewhat cursing my computer right now because it evidently does not behave in ways that it should (ie Linux). Bad Kitsune. Any ideas from the mac gurus out

Comments

[lushfemke]

What's swap space?

[fox_c]

in the words of raayat it is "the amount of stuff that is not in active memory and instead saved onto the disk"

[beetlebush]

Try Activity Monitor. It should be located in the Utilities folder in Applications.

[fox_c]

We tried that - it shows how much memory each process is using, but not if it is using the swap space. Any other ideas?

[beetlebush]

Sorry, no other ideas here. I think anything beyond Activity Monitor would require Terminal, and I never learned how to use it properly (unless you count talking to Eliza the psychotherapist, which I'd certainly hope no one does).

[gothick_matt]

First off, this might sound like a silly question, but is there anything actually _wrong_? Apart from the number in the widget?

If it's any help for comparison purposes, my iMac (2Gb RAM) is currently using about 740Mb of swap space, and it's not particularly busy.

If raayat wants to get down and dirty, he should look into the vm_stat and vmmap commands, (as well as learning how BSD top is wildly and annoying different from Linux top, but hey, it was there first!) There's an Apple article called "Viewing Virtual Memory Usage" in the Apple Developer Connection Library; you might need a login to view it here, but you can register for a free developer account.

[kuoirad]

Looks like ps -f might do what you're looking for, though you'll have to be root, dunno if simply using sudo will work. Check out the man page for ps. The problem raayat's probably running into is that it's BSD ps, not GNU ps.

[tashar]

Sorry, I'm totally clueless on this one.