How to free up space on mac from virtual memory
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You may want to get rid of these files to free up some space. There are two reasons why people might want to disable the virtual memory feature and remove the swapfile files from disk.įirst, you may be concerned about disk space usage.
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Don’t Worry About Disk Space, or Your SSD
#How to free up space on mac from virtual memory professional#
Yes, even if you have 16 GB or more of RAM, it may sometimes fill up-especially if you run demanding professional applications like video, audio, or image editors that need to store a lot of data in memory. If your physical memory fills up and the Mac operating system can’t page data out to disk, one of two bad things will happen: Either you’ll see a prompt telling you to quit one or more applications to continue, or applications will crash and you may experience general system instability. The macOS operating system and the applications running on it expect the virtual memory system to work properly. We won’t provide the relevant commands for doing this here, as we don’t recommend anyone do this. This involves disabling System Integrity Protection before telling your Mac not to run the dynamic_pager system daemon and then deleting the swapfiles. However, it is technically possible to disable the backing store-that is, those swapfiles on disk-on macOS. In fact, Apple’s official documentation says “Both OS X and iOS include a fully-integrated virtual memory system that you cannot turn off it is always on.” The macOS operating system and running applications expect it to be enabled. You really shouldn’t try to disable this feature. In the screenshot below, we can see that each of these files is 1 GB in size on my Mac. (To open a Terminal window, press Command+Space to open Spotlight search, type “Terminal”, and press Enter.) ls -lh /private/var/vm To view the contents of this directory and see how much space these files are currently using on disk, you can open a Terminal window and run the following command. This allows the Mac to save its state-including all your open applications and files-while shutting down and not using any power. This directory also contains the “sleepimage” file, which stores the contents of your Mac’s RAM on disk when it hibernates. If applications need more virtual memory, these files will grow in size as needed-and then shrink back down when they don’t need be large anymore. If applications don’t need additional virtual memory, these files won’t use much space. Instead, it stores the swapfile files on your system storage drive. Most UNIX-like operating systems use a separate partition for the swap file, permanently allocating part of your storage to swap space. The data is stored in one or more files named “swapfile” and ending with a number. Virtual memory data is stored in the /private/var/vm directory on your Mac’s internal storage if it has been paged to disk. Modern versions of macOS actually go through even more trouble to avoid paging out data to the disk, compressing data stored in memory as much as possible before paging it out. In fact, macOS is a UNIX-like operating system itself. This is basically the same thing as the page file on Windows, and the swap space on Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. If Macs couldn’t store virtual memory data on disk, you’d see messages asking you to close a program to continue. This is slower than simply keeping the data in RAM all the time, but it allows for the system to transparently just “keep working”. When the data is needed again, it’s transferred back to RAM. When your physical memory fills up, macOS automatically “pages out” data that isn’t actively being used, storing it on your Mac’s internal drive. Every 64-bit process is given about 18 exabytes-that’s 18 billion gigabytes-of space it can work with.Īpplications are free to use as much memory as they want within these limitations. For example, even if you have a Mac with 8 GB of RAM, every 32-bit process on your Mac is given 4 GB of available address space it can use. While your Mac only has a limited amount of physical memory, it exposes a larger area of available virtual memory to running programs.