Should I delete swapfiles?

Question

I have a 2011 Mac Mini with 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB of memory. I have a 55GB Solid State SATA drive and an additional drive for storage. When I first turn my computer on, the Solid State drive shows roughly  2 GB of photos, 11 GB of apps, 20 GB of "other" and 22GB of free space. Within a half hour or running my computer, I get a Start Up Disk almost full notification and the "other" is typically around 40GB. This happens whether I run adobe software, or only open safari. I've determined there are sleepimages or swapfiles being created, but is there any way to stop this? Should there be 22GB of swapfiles on my system? I've read not to delete them...but I've also read they should only be as large as your memory on your computer - mine are nearly triple.

Answer 1

There is excessive swapping of data between physical memory (that is, the memory chips on the logic board) and virtual memory (one or more files on the startup volume.) That activity is relatively slow and causes the whole system to be less responsive. It can happen for two reasons:
A long-running process with a memory leak (a kind of bug)
Not enough memory for your usage pattern
Tracking down a memory leak can be difficult, and it may come down to a process of elimination.
These instructions are for OS X 10.9 ("Mavericks.") The procedure may be slightly different for earlier versions of OS X.
When you notice the swap activity, open the Activity Monitor application and select All Processes from the View menu, if it's not already selected. Select the Memory tab. Click the heading of the Real Mem column in the process table twice to sort the table with the highest value at the top. If you don't see that column, select
View ▹ Columns ▹ Real Memory
from the menu bar.
If one process (excluding "kernel_task") is using much more memory than all the others, that could be an indication of a leak. A better indication would be a process that continually grabs more and more real memory over time without ever releasing it. Here is an example of how it's done.
The processes named "Safari Web Content" render web pages for Safari. They use a lot of memory and may leak if certain Safari extensions or third-party web plugins are installed. Consider them prime suspects.
Another process often implicated in memory leaks is "inkjet4" or "inkjet8," which is a component of the HP printing software. If it's present, force-quit the process in Activity Monitor to solve the problem temporarily. Empty the print queues in the Printers & Scanners preference pane (which has a slightly different name in each recent version of OS X.) If you don't use an HP printer, remove the software. Otherwise, if the problem is recurrent, update the software (which may not help) or contact HP support.
"Wired" memory should be a small part of the total. That memory is not swapped, but it makes less physical memory available which may then result in swapping. If you have a lot of wired memory, that's usually an indication of a memory leak in a third-party program that modifies the operating system at a low level. Ask for guidance in that case.
If you don't have an obvious memory leak, your options are to install more memory (if possible) or to run fewer programs simultaneously.
The next suggestion is only for users familiar with the shell. For a more precise, but potentially misleading, test, run the following command: 
sudo leaks -nocontext -nostacks process | grep total
where process is the name of a process you suspect of leaking memory. Almost every process will leak some memory; the question is how much, and especially how much the leak increases with time. I can’t be more specific. See the  leaks(1) man page and the Apple developer documentation for details.