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I think my swap memory is hitting its fullest and would like to know how to increase it.

I very often hit my 8GB RAM limits and my memory pressure (as seen in Active Monitor) goes red quite often. When that happens "Memory Used" and "Swap Used" are both almost 8GB, so I guess I would like the swap to be 16GB.

It's so easy to find this info for ubuntu but with OS X I only find links for "how to disable swap" which is not what I want at all.

P.S. Not rich enough to buy a macbook with 16GB RAM.

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    Not rich enough to buy a macbook with 16GB RAM why not just buy 16GB for the macbook you have now? Your preformance would increase noticabley if you stopped swapping...
    – Matt Clark
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 18:30
  • Only the hard drive is upgradable in my macbook. But even if it was upgradable it's still not what I have asked.
    – kiradotee
    Commented Jan 7, 2016 at 19:43
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    I don't think swap is limited to 8GB. What happens when you create even more processes?
    – Gilby
    Commented Jan 13, 2016 at 0:17

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Swap is issued only when needed. There is no limit so if you have a memory leak, that will crash a program or allocate swap to grow as needed.

Usually the kernel detects and protects you, but worst case, reboot and swap is cleaned each restart.

How are you measuring things to conclude “swap memory is fullest”? It starts empty and grows as you use the system and then cleans each reboot. What value is swap now?

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