VAR and Swap Files - Taking up 3 gigs of space!

My 60 gig HD has been getting close to its size limit so I ran DiskSweeper to see if there were some unneeded files etc. that I could throw away. I discovered that the VAR folder was using 1.95 gigs and in the VM folder, the swap files were taking up about 1 gig...
I guess these are essential system files and can’t be deleted or reduced in size, or can they?
Thanks in advance!

To clear the swap file(s) restart your computer. I've never had more than two swap files, but then I have enough RAM for what I do. If your system keeps creating large swap files then it is a sign you need more RAM. If you can't get more, you'll need to limit the number of RAM hungry programs you have running at the same time. Because of the things that get dynamically created as you work, such as swap files and temp files, you should have a minimum of 10% of your drive free, and 15 would be safer. If I were you I would make sure I always had 10GBs free. You might look into getting an external drive, and move some of your files over to it. For instance, you can move your iTunes music library to another drive--I've done that because my startup drive is also a "mere" 60GBs.
Francine
Schwieder

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My MacBook (late 2009 Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63) often runs VERY slow...beach ball of death frequently. My page ins (5.29GB), page outs (5.64BG), and swap files (10GB) seem extremely high in comparison to most other discussions in here. HELP!!??

My MacBook (late 2009 Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63) often runs VERY slow...beach ball of death frequently. My page ins (3.29GB), page outs (5.64BG), and swap files (10GB) seem extremely high in comparison to most other discussions in here. I don't know how to copy the pie chart so it shows on here but here's what it says right now:
Free - 176 MB
Wired - 592MB
Active - 843MB
Inactive - 432MB
Used - 1.82 GB
VM size - 198GB
The page ins and page outs have 0 bytes/sec in the parenthesis even though the numbers are so high.
Any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated!!!

You difinately need more ram. 2gb is the bare minimum to run just the Lion OS, anything extra will slow your Mac to a crawl. Upgrade to 8gb from either Crucial http://www.crucial.com/ or OWC http://eshop.macsales.com/
And you will be a happy camper!

Swap file keeps increasing until out of space

Hello, I have a serious problem with my swap file on my 10.6 server. My server is creating swap files that are 1.06 GB each! and it will keep creating these files until it uses all available disc space which is around 40GB. At that moment, the server will basically crash. Has anyone seen this before? I have 2GB memory, could they be bad?
thanks!

dunne89 wrote:
I have the same problem. I hav 62 swap files weighing in at 1.07GB EACH!! When i run multiple applications it says its running out of memory even though theres 100GB left on my hard drive. Im running 10.6.8. I did a reboot about a week ago and it deleted all the swap files but one, which is great, but now they've gradually built back up again and i dont kno what to do. i dont want to have to reboot every few days to be able to use my computer. any suggestions?
As mentioned, what cured it for me was installing the 10.6.8 version 1.1 combo update. Even if you have already previously upgraded to 10.6.8 nothing prevents you re-running this combo update. You can download it from here http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1402
It is normal for VM usage to grow over time especially if the computer is running a number of apps, but my previous problem was using up space far faster than normal and is now back to normal after running the combo update.

"Other" taking up 1 gig of space!

As you know the catigories for memory are-
-Audio
-Photos
-Other
This "Other" is taking up too much space and I'm not happy about it. I don't know what's in other or what I'm stuffing it with but, I know that this is bad. Please help!
iPod nano 1st generation 4 gigabytes Mac OS X (10.4.9) finder says it's empty

If there's nothing on the iPod which you want to keep that isn't in your computer, use the instructions in this article to restore the iPod, and then transfer the music, videos, and other files back to it.
(21442)

HT4878 Backups and Other files taking valuable GBs

I used these instructions to free up the backup used by Time Machine (Thanks! ) but a large "Other" file remains of 75+ GBs. How do I determine if that much space is needed for Other and how can I delete it?
Should Time Machine backups not be done automatically, but rather scheduled?

I see this is an older post but wanted to share what I have figured out as I was having the same issues.
I have my back ups in Time Machine but on an external hard drive. But if you leave Time Machine on, it will take snap shots and store them as "Other". What I did with that situation was move my Time Machine back-up to the external drive and then turn off Time Machine.
I have seen in posts that people say that there are aslo Pages/Numbers/PDF files stored as other. I do not think that is correct. I believe the documents are stored within the application and will explain later.
And for the biggie, at least for me seems to have been iTunes. I have also put it on it's own external hard drive to free up most of the hard drive. My iTunes is over 300G and my laptop is 500G.
So the best way I found to remove the items that are stored as other has been with a 3rd party wipping tool. I use BCWipe. It wipes all of the files you select. You can select the trash, free space, individual files, and the complete hard drive if you are selling or trashing the computer/hard drive.
What no one has been able to tell me and I just happened to notice this. I travel a lot and I will normally load some movies from my iTunes to the iPad for the flight. Then "delete" them from the iPad by deselecting them in iTunes when I re-sync.
I would normally have 30-40G as the other files or more. Then one day while I had the iPad synced up to iTunes, I was doing a wipe of my trash and happened to see it the BCWipe window. A lot of iTunes files with .trashes extenstions. So after everything was done I went back to disk utility and the storage display, now my backups AND other was 0. (See Below)
As you can see as far as the back-ups, once you turn off Time Machine and then re-start your computer that will clear. I still have a lot of Pages/Numbers/PDF documents in my documents folder but as you can see, there is zero KB as "Other" but the Apps has 27.2 GB.
I forgot to mention that I only turn on Time Machine when I plug in my Time Machine external hard drive to do a back-up. After the back-up is complete, Time Machine goes off.

I like to manually upload my photo's to my computer, then import them to iPhoto. My problem with this is that now I have duplicates and it's taking up way to much space on my computer. Is there any way to stop iPhoto from creating duplicates like this?

I always manually transfer photo's from my SD card to a new folder under Pictures, and then import them into iPhoto. After doing this for quite some time I know realize that I have all these duplicate photo's between iPhoto library and Pictures and a ton of wasted space. I want to continue to upload photo's to a new folder so I can organize them myself and then access them anytime through the finder, if I upload them through iPhoto then they're stored in "iPhoto Library" which can only be accessed through iPhoto. Is there anyway to stop iPhoto from duplicating photo's and just use it to catalog photo's from Pictures? Also on a side note, when using multiple SD cards in one folder, my camera often comes up with duplicate names for totally separate photo's, anyone have an suggestions for this?

Yes you can set iPhoto to run in Referenced mode but don't. It makes more work for zero advantage, is unnecessary and only storing up problems for the future.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3062728?tstart=0
has how to do, and why you shouldn't.
Using iPhoto makes the question about the filenames moot too... Other than that you'll need to renae the files.

How to completely get rid of the "Others" space on the Iphone4s? (It's taking away 2 gigs of space)

I just want to get rid of the "Other" space on the Iphone and that's all. Any suggestion or even maybe apple themeselve could finally help for once :/

Other data
Should only be about 1GB and larger than this may indicate corrupt data
Read http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/how_remove_other_data_your_iphone
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4542883?start=0&tstart=0
To get rid of it you need to Restore not from a backup
Restoring http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414

Swap partition VS Swap File system

Hi everyone!!
I am using Oracle 11g (enterprise edition) on linux redhat 5.5 . At present, we have 12G RAM and swap partition of 2G. I know that we should have swap area of 6GB as per RAM. But we are unable to create new swap partition or resize existing. So I want to know is should I create new swap file of 4Gb that can be used as swap area in addition to existing swap partition of 2Gb. So that total swap area will be of 6G
( 2G swap space + 4G swap file).
1. Will it be meaningful or not ?
2. Which one is better among swap partition and swap file ?
3. Will swap file cause performance degradation due to incompatibility between them ?
Thanks & Regards
Tushar Lapani

This is a 100 percent Unix question and has nothing to with Oracle RDBMS.
Please close this question here and post it in any Unix forum.
Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA

Swap Partition Vs Swap file

Hi everyone!!
I am using Oracle 11g (enterprise edition) on linux redhat 5.5 . At present, we have 12G RAM and swap partition of 2G. I know that we should have swap area of 6GB as per RAM. But we are unable to create new swap partition or resize existing. So I want to know is should I create new swap file of 4Gb that can be used as swap area in addition to existing swap partition of 2Gb. So that total swap area will be of 6G
( 2G swap space + 4G swap file).
1. Will it be meaningful or not ?
2. Which one is better among swap partition and swap file ?
3. Will swap file cause performance degradation due to incompatibility between them ?
Thanks & Regards
Tushar Lapani

Swap is no substitute for RAM. It provides a fail-safe mechanism and allows the kernel to handle active memory allocation more efficiently.
Your requirement or conclusion about swap space may or may not be reasonable, depending on your desired configuration. As a rule of thumb, swap space is usually configured twice the RAM if you use 8 GB or less and equal the amount of RAM if you have 16 GB or more. If you have 64 GB of RAM, it does however not make sense to have 64 GB of swap space, because the performance degration should you ever need that much swap space will be very bad.
A swap file as opposed to a swap partition has some security and safety concerns, and some performance overhead because of using a file system, but it can be feasible. It depends on your I/O use and hardware.
However, you will probably want to configure your Oracle database to use kernel Hugepages using ASMM instead of AMM for best performance and efficient memory use. Kernel Hugepages, unlike POSIX shared memory (/dev/shm) used by AMM, will be pre-allocated at system startup and cannot use swap space.
Message was edited by: Dude!
Until kernel 2.4 it was considered that a swap partition is faster than a file, but with the improvements of kernel 2.6, the performances is almost the same. A swap file has the advantage that it can be easier re-sized or removed than a swap partition, but it can get fragmented or deleted by accident. For best performance it should also be located at the outer parts (beginning) of the disk.

Swap file in use after 12 minutes uptime

Hi
I noticed this a little bit of a strange behavior recently. Once I power my Mac up, the amount of free memory is around 1.34 GB, as I don't have many startup items. Then I launch Skype and torrent client (µTorrent or Transmission) and wait about 10-12 minutes - the amount of inactive memory becomes almost half of total, 20-30 MB free, and swap file is already in use. I mean is that normal with total physical RAM of 2 GB? As far as I know the Unused memory is used for apps I quit not to reallocate it once I launch it again. Nothing launched - nothing to keep unused, right? And swap file is in use for a reason I don't quite well understand. I mean I got the idea behind virtual memory, but this behavior is something that haven't been there before. Just in case - I "Erase & Install"-ed the system last week, so it is pretty "clean".
Also the screenshot of my iStat pro widget to illustrate the situation.

Swapping happens because there is more demand for memory than you have, and some modified pages have been sitting idle longer than other pages that are in use.
If you think you have too little memory for the application set you are using, then do the following and find out. Launch Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal and enter the command:
sar -g 60 100
This will tell you the pageout information every 60 seconds for 100 minutes (adjust 60 and 100 to suit your tastes).
If you mostly have zeros or very low numbers, then you do not have a serious memory problem. If you have an occasional burst of pageouts, but the rest of the time it is zero, you do not have a memory problem. However, if you have sustained pageouts, especially when you notice a performance slow down, then you could benefit from more memory, or run applications that are less memory intensive (or if running too many concurrent applications that you are not really using, quit a few).
Programmers tend to write applications that consume as much memory as they like without concern for how much memory you actually have. In some cases they have have development systems with a lot more memory than you do, so they don't even notice that they are consuming a lot of memory. This is speaking as a programmer that started life writting code on 80 column punched cards and running them on systems with 8192 bytes of memory

High swap file utilization - 11g on windows 2003 x64

Hi,
I'm running database 11.1.0.6 patch set 10 on
Windows Server 2003 x64 standard
HP DL380 dual quad core + 8GB RAM
2 x 72GB 15K SAS mirror for OS
6 x 72GB 15k SAS RAID-5 for data + logs (i know ideally logs need to move to a RAID-1 set etc)
dedicated mode
database is about 10GB (main set of tables about 1GB)
SGA + PGA 4GB (auto memory management)
server has been set to network application mode such that less mem is allocated to the system cache etc.
Large Page support has been enabled (not confirmed if this is working, any ideas how to?)
Looking at the page faults and page out perf mon stats it looks too high/ too much given the arrangement above. The majority of the page faults are coming from the Oracle.exe process. But I cannot explain why specially if Large Page is setup then the SGA etc should be locked in to RAM as I understand.
side note I was seeing similar behaviour on the older 10.2.0.1 DB that had same mem config for the same set of data.
Any ideas people?
Thanks

JA,
On the server, open Task Manager and then select the Processes tab. Make certain that it is configured to show the Page Faults column and click on the entry for the Oracle instance so that it is highlighted. Then, open a command prompt and start SQL*Plus with the /NOLOG command line parameter. Make note of the current value of Page Faults and then connect to the database instance using SQL*Plus using the SYS user account (or some other account). You will probably find that the Page Faults value jumped by about 302 as a result of the login, and the value just might jump again when you disconnect from the database. Keep in mind that each session connecting to an Oracle instance running on Windows will require at least 1MB of memory immediately on connection as an additional thread is created (assuming shared server is not used). If each memory page were 4KB in size (as is the standard in Windows), there would likely be at least 256 (1MB / 4KB) page faults for each login, and possibly the same amount per disconnect. With this in mind, I am not so certain that 500 page faults per second is a high value for a Oracle process running on Windows if users/applications are constantly connecting and disconnecting from the Oracle database instance.
To determine if there is a performance problem caused by memory utilization, what you may want to do is take a look at the PF Usage value on the Performance tab of Task Manager. This is NOT the page file usage, regardless of the warnings that appear in Enterprise Manager - this is total memory allocation including RAM and swap file usage. There is an interesting thread where I discovered the actual meaning of PF Usage here:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.databases.oracle.server/browse_thread/thread/b62c4d761cace2a6
If the PF Usage is considerably less than the amount of the RAM in the server (8GB RAM -> PF near 7GB is OK), you will likely be OK, as long as you do not attempt to move multi-gigabyte files around - doing so could cause short term memory starvation issues for Oracle. You might want to verify that the File and Printer Sharing option of the network card is set to "Maximize throughput for network applications" so that Windows will limit the memory used for file caching.
Charles Hooper
IT Manager/Oracle DBA
K&M Machine-Fabricating, Inc.

*_debug and *_profile files - delete to free some space

Hi, I have found that I have a lot of *_debug and *_profile files taking a lot of space.
From
/Users/angr/USBHDOS10.2/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Fr ameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/HIToolbox_debug
to a collection of
/usr/lib/libobjc.A_profile.dylib
/usr/lib/libobjc_profile.A.dylib
/usr/lib/libobjc_profile.dylib
/usr/libexec/gdb/symfiles/libobjc_profile.A.dylib.syms
Is it safe to delete all that? I do build some unix tools sometimes, but never profile... at max I try to add extra -O flag and compare performance. Debugging is more sensitive stuff as one never knows...

Anton Grigoriev wrote:
But these are not exactly languages that affect, rather architectures.
Quite. You asked about the problems with Monolingual which I had referred to and I raised the Rosetta issue in that context. Indeed, had Monolingual stuck to language-removal many of the problems would have been avoided. It did not, however, and many users were caught out by this.
I am a proud PPC user and I do not delete Intel part in case I ever get a newer Mac.
BTW the trick with find and remove lproj folders was initially revealed by Bombich in DeLocalizer (the line was formed in GUI placed in the buffer for possible inspection).
I know. Trimmit uses it, too. I came across Trimmit before DeLocalizer, though.
I wonder If the same easy trick is known for architectures part - would be nice to know how much Intel stuff takes on PPC.
It is not quite as easy in this case because you can't tell just from the names. Generally, a single binary will support multiple architectures so to "slim" an application in this way you have to alter the binary. Apple supplies a tool you can use to do this (and that's what Trimmit and, presumably, Monolingual and XSlimmer) use to remove support for (hopefully) unwanted/unneeded architectures. I do use Trimmit on applications, though not Apple ones. I figure if I ever move to intel, most of the apps I now have will have released new versions anyway so it wouldn't make sense (for the most part) to transfer existing applications. What I like about Trimmit is that, by default, it creates a backup so you can test the "trimmed" version before committing yourself by deleting the original!
- cfr

Name of .crl and .crt file missing from HTTP URL in certificate details

Hello Everyone,
I am in the process of building a 2-tier Windows Server 2012 R2 PKI. The CA name of both the offline standalone root CA and enterprise subordinate CA have spaces in it (we'll call the CA name, 'Test Lab Root CA' for point of reference).
When I submitted the certificate request for the subordinate CA to the root CA and viewed the attributes/extensions of the pending request, I noticed the HTTP URL is missing the name of the .crt and .crl file.
The AIA extension reads URL=http://test.domainname.com/pki/.crt
in the issued certificate details.
The CDP extension reads URL=http://test.domainname.com/pki/.crl
in the issued certificate details.
The AIA and CDP location HTTP URLs are configured as http://test.domainname.com/pki/<CertificateName>.crt and http://test.domainname.com/pki/<CRLNameSuffix><DeltaCRLAllowed>.crl, respectively on the
root CA.
The LDAP URL shows the .crt and .crl file name (with %20 replacing the spaces) perfectly fine. The LDAP URL is configured using variables as well. It's just the HTTP URL that is missing the name of the file altogether.
I have read about the issue where spaces are not being replaced with %20 in the URL on Windows Server 2012 and a hotfix is available for that issue. But this issue seems to be slightly different and I'm running Windows Server 2012 R2. I tried installing
the hotfix to see if it would help, but the hotfix can't install because it doesn't apply to Server 2012 R2.
I've been trying to find a technet discussion or blog article for a week to see if anyone has seen this and what the fix is, but I'm coming up empty. I only find talks about %20 not replacing the space in the name.
Does anyone have any insight to my particular issue? I don't want to issue the subordinate CA certificate until I know the HTTP URL populates the CRL and CRT file name correctly. I can get around this by typing out the name of the file (with spaces and not
%20... e.g. http://test.domainname.com/pki/Test Lab Root CA.crl) in the URL via the registry and the URL displays the name of the file (with %20 in the name) when I do another certificate request and check the attributes/extensions in the
pending request. However, I prefer to avoid manually typing out the name of the file in the registry. I'd like to use the variables if at all possible.
Any help/guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

On Fri, 27 Mar 2015 03:42:28 +0000, Brian Komar [MVP] wrote:
You have totally messed up the URLs.
If you run certutil -getreg ca\CRLPublicationURLs and certutil -getreg ca\CACertPublicationURLs, you will see that you do not have correct use of variables when compared to the settings that follow:
The URLs should be set to the following for an offline CA:
certutil -setreg CA\CRLPublicationURLs "1:%WINDIR%\system32\CertSrv\CertEnroll\%%3%%8%%9.crl\n2:http://test.domainname.com/pki/%%3%%8%%9.crl"
*certutil -setreg CA\CACertPublicationURLs "1:%WINDIR%\system32\CertSrv\CertEnroll\%%1_%%3%%4.crt\n2:http://*test.domainname.com*/pki/%%1_%%3%%4.crt"*
For an issuing CA, they should be set to:
The URLs should be set to the following for an offline CA:*certutil -setreg CA\CRLPublicationURLs "65:%WINDIR%\system32\CertSrv\CertEnroll\%%3%%8%%9.crl\n6:http://test.domainname.com/pki/%%3%%8%%9.crl"*
*certutil -setreg CA\CACertPublicationURLs "1:%WINDIR%\system32\CertSrv\CertEnroll\%%1_%%3%%4.crt\n2:http://**test.domainname.com**/pki/%%1_%%3%%4.crt"*
Just a clarification here, if you're running the above certutil commands at
the command prompt you only need single % characters in the command line.
The double % characters are only required if the commands are being run in
a batch file.
Paul Adare - FIM CM MVP

Swap File - Where to find and how to edit?

I have a game with requirements I all meet/exceed, but one is unknown to me. And that is the need for a 1GB swap file. I'm not sure where to check to find it, nor how to edit/make one if it's not big enough.
I'm a bit of a dunce when it comes to these sorts of things, so any help would be appreciated.

Unix will "page" before it "swaps". Applications require memory for two reasons: (1) they need to load the application program code (or at least some of it) into memory, and (2) as you do things with the program, it needs some memory space for all the data your program is dealing with which is NOT application program code.
As more memory is needed, the Unix kernel will begin by taking memory listed as being "free" (memory that nothing is using - and btw it's normal for a good Unix operating system to try to keep that number low... you paid for the memory so it might as well do something for you and Mac OS X will try to find a user for it.)
As the "free" / available memory is depleted, the kernel will begin stealing memory from the "inactive" list (memory which was previously used by some other application, but that application doesn't seem to want to use it right now -- usually because it is no longer running. It doesn't immediately return memory to the "free" list because odds are good you may re-run the application and the system will be faster if the code that would otherwise have needed to be read in from disk is already in memory.)
As the "inactive" memory is depleted, it will then begin "paging" applications which are still technically in memory, but seem to be idle right now. It doesn't drop the "data" being managed by those applications... instead it just frees up memory used by that application's code. It does this (as opposed to freeing memory used for data) because the code can easily just be re-read in from the disk drive (no need to 'save' the memory before freeing it because it's already on disk.)
Only when all else fails (no 'free' memory, no 'inactive' memory, and no idle applications that can have their code pages dropped) will the system begin to 'swap' (swapping is the slowest way of creating more virtual memory.)
Unless you have a very small amount of real memory (in which case just upgrade... RAM is cheap!) or have a LOT of other active applications running on your system at the same time which also are demanding a lot of memory (in which case, just 'Quit' the other applications before starting your game), then your performance issue is not likely caused by a lack of memory.

I deleted all my photos and videos and then delete the deleted files but the photo app is still taking up 12 GB of space and I have no room for new stuff. How can I clear the memory space used by my deleted videos and photos?

I deleted all my photos and videos and then delete the deleted files but the photo app is still taking up 12 GB of space and I have no room for new stuff. How can I clear the memory space used by my deleted videos and photos? I don't know why the photos are still taking up space and if I will have to reset my phone to get rid of the problem.

Hey there TowneJ,
Welcome to Apple Support Communities.
The article linked below provides troubleshooting tips that’ll likely resolve the issue that you’ve described, where deleted files appear to be taking up space on your iPhone 5.
If you get a "Not enough free space" alert on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support
So long,
-Jason

VAR and Swap Files - Taking up 3 gigs of space!

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