Swap constantly grows - but why?

Hello.
I've noticed that my system constantly makes the swapfile bigger but I don't quite understand why…
MacBook-Pro:~ alex$ du -sch /private/var/vm/swapfile*
64M /private/var/vm/swapfile0
64M /private/var/vm/swapfile1
128M /private/var/vm/swapfile2
256M /private/var/vm/swapfile3
512M /private/var/vm/swapfile4
512M /private/var/vm/swapfile5
512M /private/var/vm/swapfile6
512M /private/var/vm/swapfile7
512M /private/var/vm/swapfile8
512M /private/var/vm/swapfile9
3,5G total
If I sum up the amount of the physical memory shown by activity monitor, I end up with about 2.4 GB. I've got 4 GB RAM. Why is any Swap used at all in this case? And even more important: Why does it keep on growing?
!http://i.pgu.me/Vsava6Fi_original.png!
Thanks,
Alexander

Because between the time you booted your Mac and when you look at /var/vm,
you ran applications that wanted more memory than you have phyical RAM.
And looking at your resident RAM usage is meaningless with respect to swap usage.
There is no easy way to figure out what is in swap.
Virtual memory is filled with empty holes, so that cannot be used
to measure swap usage.
And both virtual and resident RAM may be counting shared library code
so there may be double (or greater) counting of the same physical RAM page.
If you have 3.5GB of swap, it is because you peaked out at needing 3.5GB
of swap.
The more important question is, are you seeing a performance issue due
to swapping?
I like to start a Terminal session and run the following command:
sar -g 60 100
which will show pageout activity once per minute for 100 minutes
(adjust values to suit your tastes).
When you see jumps in pageout activity, you can cross reference
that against what you are currently doing.
Web browsers can be memory intensive depending on what web sites
you visit. Also photo and movie editors are very memory intensive.

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