Can I delete the swapfiles?

Question

I've had slowdowns lately (80 GB HD, 1.25 GB RAM)...lots of beachballs (esp. with Safari...always esp. with Safari. Restarting Safari temporarily helps the situation).
My HD free space was down to about 3 GB. Deleted some big items I didn't need, and now have 4.8 GB free. However, when I added up the size of the root folders, I should have about 8 or 9 GB free. Used TinkerTool to show invisible files and found 3+ GB of swapfiles in private\var\vm (two 1 GB ones, a 512 MB, a 256 MB, etc. The latest is dated 4 July, which may be the last time I restarted my machine). I'd like to get rid of the swapfiles, but don't want to mess things up.
thanks
EB

Answer 1

"Swap files are easily misunderstood. They will disappear when no longer needed, but they go away in reverse order, i.e., newest first. There is no way to know what is in a given file, so it is unpredictable when a file will be deleted."
I am sorry, but that is just plain incorrect. Again, while this is how vm is SUPPOSED to work, there is a bug in its implementation in OSX, and in some installations, swap files will NOT disappear. EVER. Instead, new ones are continually created until all free disk space is consumed, the system thrashes, and eventually crashes. It does no good for you to insist it is otherwise, as empirical evidence indicates this indeed occurs. I have almost 1 Gig of physical memory. With 0 user processes running, I have been in situations with dozens of swap files totaling many gigabytes. In addition, any number of people have reported swap files that do NOT even get removed at boot time, and simply hang around taking up space after each reboot.
In fact, on my dual G4, I have NEVER observed a swap file "going away." That is why these utilities that delete the unused swap files exist.
Also, they are not necessarily removed in reverse order, even when operating as designed. They are removed as needed, which can occur in any order.
"Active memory is always allocated in RAM. So if you quit that application, the swap file will generally not disappear right away. The swap space is being used for something else."
However, after quitting ALL applications, the swap space should not be being used for anything, and yet I still often have 7, 8, or more swap files, taking up several gigabytes of disk space. I can let the machine sit overnight running nothing, and no swap files are deleted. I can go away for the week, and still they sit there. Which leads to:
"From the point of view of the file system the file doesn't change until it is deleted. The modification time will not change. It is meaningless for judging when the file was last used."
Except that after you delete all running applications, you can pretty much guess that swap files created first are doing NOTHING.
None of this addresses the central problem. After all, there is a reason why this question is still marked "unanswered" after all this time.