I would like to turn off memory swapping on my MacBook Air M2 for Anaconda/Python. When I run some python codes (in jupyterlab Chrome) they can easily swap 20 GB, I don't want to swap it since speed it not relevant for me in this case plus it wouldn't take much longer without swapping. How to do it please?

Newbie to macOS and was running into some memory issues. I've tried restarting my mac, which reset memory back to normal levels, but within 2-3 days swap and compressed memory fill up very quickly and I am forced to close applications or my macbook will crash. I haven't been running anything too memory intensive, probably just around 30-40 tabs on Firefox and a couple projects in Intellij. Any tips of how to troubleshoot and get to the culprit?

I've been using Macs for 15 years, starting from a 2009 MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM, then upgrading to a 2016 MBP with 16 GB of RAM, and now, since last December (2023), upgraded to my first Apple Silicon Mac, an M3 Max 16" MBP. For context, the first MBP has 320 GB of spinning storage, the second has 500 GB of SSD, and this one has a 2 TB SSD. Never until yesterday I had received the message shown here: "Your system has run out of application memory". I've been using the same kind of apps since 2009, and always had plenty of apps open at the same time, and I'm doing nothing really different now that I wasn't doing before. I regularly (at least once per week) restart or shut down the Mac. This is from Activity Monitor just after the message came up: I initially thought this was Acrobat since after quitting it (which was using about 3.5 GB of memory with no open document at all...) the situation stabilised for a while, then it happened again yesterday, and today when I opened Illustrator. Just launching the app caused this message to pop up. I have read previous posts on this same issue but no one seemed to relate to Apple Silicon. Again, on Intel, I have never had this, and with much less memory than I do. Also, look at the graph, no swap used at all. Shouldn't Mac just use Swap if there is an issue instead of asking the user to force quit apps? I honestly do not understand what is going on here. The SSD is about 80% free! Finally, I have been doing the same things since getting this Mac, and it had never happened before. Even if I launched all apps together at the same time, this should just not happen, and the system should manage memory far better than this. For the records, I am not noticing any slowdown in the way the Mac behaves, the CPU usage is not stressed at all. What can / should I do?

I am using Mobile simulator and Virtual machines which are memory intensive. There are a few posts on internet about **how to change the location of Swap files on macOS versions with System Integrity Protection (SIP)**. The simplest solution without tinkering with OS internals seems to be running the below shell command after boot: sysctl vm.swapfileprefix=/Volumes/Swap/s (here /Volumes/Swap is the new swap directory) But unless SIP is disabled this command can't be executed. There should be a way to configure this on startup as I can't keep SIP disabled just to execute this command. Does setting this in */etc/sysctl.conf* work on macOS? Has anyone of you tried this? This solution is suggested in this post from 2015 for older versions of macOS when SIP didn't exist. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/1465/how-can-i-move-virtual-memory-swap-files-to-a-different-drive-or-partition **Open to any other alternative solutions.** Sorry for cross posting but I didn't get any constructive replies on Apple forum.

Using this version of docker, The swap memory in docker desktop is limited to 4GB. >On windows, this default value could be doubled by specifying **"SwapMiB": 8192** in a settings file located at %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Docker\settings.json > This file is read at startup, so after making changes, restart the app. How do I increase this limit on the macOS version of docker desktop app?

I am running some extremely memory intensive calculations that can balloon to use a great deal of memory for a process (a java program). I have increased the maximum java heap size to 64 GB to allow for this. Java memory usage gets to approximately 66 GB, and then my system comes to a halt and I begin to get "out of application memory" errors. Similarly, when one of my python processes expands to beyond 96 GB of memory usage, it is forcibly killed by the OS. I have 16 GB of physical ram and >1.5TB of free SSD space for swap; why would I be running out of memory? Why doesn't swap expand further? I am running Monterey 12.3.1 on an M1 system. Here are the first 20 lines of my activity monitor Memory tab

Process Name                   Memory    Threads Ports
 Icy (Not Responding)           66.68 GB  61      431
 Firefox                        957.9 MB  82      3,916
 WindowServer                   802.4 MB  22      2,270
 FirefoxCP WebExtensions        340.2 MB  30      473
 Dropbox                        286.7 MB  137     866
 syncthing                      190.2 MB  19      94
 FirefoxCP Isolated Web Content 162.4 MB  30      161
 FirefoxCP Isolated Web Content 124.6 MB  30      171
 Quicksilver                    122.3 MB  11      444
 Preview                        108.9 MB  3       267
 Activity Monitor               108.1 MB  7       651
 TextEdit                       102.6 MB  3       288
 FirefoxCP Isolated Web Content 99.7 MB   30      172
 Finder                         97.2 MB   6       590
 loginwindow                    95.8 MB   4       484
 1Password 7                    92.3 MB   5       601
 mds                            67.6 MB   8       300
 Dropbox Helper (GPU)           58.2 MB   8       163
 FirefoxCP Privileged Content   55.4 MB   30      200

And here is the output from vm_stat:

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes)
 Pages free:                                4581.
 Pages active:                            173948.
 Pages inactive:                          168906.
 Pages speculative:                         5133.
 Pages throttled:                              0.
 Pages wired down:                        119918.
 Pages purgeable:                             89.
 "Translation faults":                 726424696.
 Pages copy-on-write:                    2352123.
 Pages zero filled:                     75215138.
 Pages reactivated:                    119697667.
 Pages purged:                           1363563.
 File-backed pages:                        40710.
 Anonymous pages:                         307277.
 Pages stored in compressor:             4404306.
 Pages occupied by compressor:            527236.
 Decompressions:                       553185303.
 Compressions:                         578504830.
 Pageins:                                4814101.
 Pageouts:                                135825.
 Swapins:                              302428830.
 Swapouts:                             314732554.

I want to calculate the **memory usage as a percentage** for some processes on the device. That is, **how much percent of total memory a particular process is taking on the system.** (Need it for reporting some metrics for both Windows and Mac devices, so the percentage seems to be consistent among both) With the top command, we get the memory usage as size (KB, MB, GB) and the value is also not the actual physical memory (RAM) used but the virtual memory (physical + swap memory). Q1. So, if I manually calculate the memory usage percentage, what formula should I use: - (process mem usage from top command) / (total physical memory + swap space used) * 100 - (process mem usage from top command) / (total physical memory + swap space alloted) * 100 - (process mem usage from top command) / (total physical memory) * 100 Q2. Is there any other way other than top command which only gives physical memory usage for individual processes so that I can use the third formula above? Example: If Chrome is using 1 GB of memory, then I can say that it is using xx % of memory. But to calculate that I need the same units in the numerator (memory usage of the process) and denominator (memory available in the system).

By "accurately describes the amount of used memory", I mean does it report (or can it be calculated) the same amount of memory use as described in Activity Monitor? My intent is to find a method to programmatically access the amount of used physical memory in the system. In .NET Core 3.1 on Mac, this is impossible. My next option is to query a command line tool. My concern is that the figures reported below do not total up to 14.20 GB of used memory as expected in the above screenshot. This is why I claim they are inaccurate. Below is what I've tried so far and why this is not a duplicate question. All commands were ran a second apart from each other after the above screenshot was taken. - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4286/is-there-a-mac-os-x-terminal-version-of-the-free-command-in-linux-systems The accepted answer's Python script does not provide accurate numbers. "Real Mem Total" (which is calculated by summing the rss of all running processes and converting it to bytes) comes up to 11.2 GB when in reality I'm using 14.20 GB.

Wired Memory:		5247 MB
Active Memory:		4170 MB
Inactive Memory:	3813 MB
Free Memory:		609 MB
Real Mem Total (ps):	11226.922 MB

- top's "PhysMem" field claims that I'm using 15 GB on my system is in use. This is somewhat close, but it is has very rough rounding and sometimes rounds up to 16 GB in use.

PhysMem: 15G used (5269M wired), 960M unused.

- https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/317483/how-to-calculate-used-memory-on-mac-os-by-command-line The only answer describes vm_stat which is inaccurate and does not properly answer the question. I've read from around the web that to get the amount of used memory, you must sum "Active", "Inactive", and "Wired down" rows, then multiply it by page size. On this Catalina machine, this comes up to 13.8 GB (output below). Still kind of close, but this math is off by more than a GB on another Catalina machine.

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free:                              161443.
Pages active:                           1065326.
Pages inactive:                          974107.
Pages speculative:                        89929.
Pages throttled:                              0.
Pages wired down:                       1343201.
Pages purgeable:                          18630.
"Translation faults":                2149730807.
Pages copy-on-write:                  123210957.
Pages zero filled:                    965651547.
Pages reactivated:                    129523087.
Pages purged:                           3285194.
File-backed pages:                       292639.
Anonymous pages:                        1836723.
Pages stored in compressor:             3394212.
Pages occupied by compressor:            559818.
Decompressions:                       166263782.
Compressions:                         206698757.
Pageins:                              358184714.
Pageouts:                              10064704.
Swapins:                              123517427.
Swapouts:                             126184348.

- memory_pressure doesn't seem to provide any accurate information related to memory usage. "System-wide memory free percentage" claims to be 54%, but 14.2 / 16 GB are in use.

The system has 2147483648 (524288 pages with a page size of 4096).

Stats:
Pages free: 162828
Pages purgeable: 16659
Pages purged: 3285194

Swap I/O:
Swapins: 123517427
Swapouts: 126184348

Page Q counts:
Pages active: 1062737
Pages inactive: 972247
Pages speculative: 89910
Pages throttled: 0
Pages wired down: 1346397

Compressor Stats:
Pages used by compressor: 559818
Pages decompressed: 166263778
Pages compressed: 206698757

File I/O:
Pageins: 358184697
Pageouts: 10064704

System-wide memory free percentage: 54%

I am running Mac OS Catalina 10.15.6 with APFS formatted disk on an unsupported MAC using dosdude1 guide. My experience from windows is I had to make careful calculations on pagefile.sys and run into limits on swap and memory. Since I’m new to Mac, I wish to avoid any mistakes and learn how to manage things properly. This is the view of my disk I have 4 Gigs of RAM on my system. I want to increase the sizeof the Virtual Memory VM (which is 3.22 GB currently). I have searched the internet in vain. Even a question in Ask Different has not been answered. My terms to solve this on windows aren’t helping me on Mac. How do I achieve my goals and choose which size I should allocate?

I have a MacBook Air, but it only has 8GB of RAM. I need more than that for some apps, so I want more virtual RAM (I know it's not as fast as physical RAM, but it will be very useful) and I want to know how to increase virtual RAM on Mac OS 13 (Ventura).

I have a temp file stored in virtual memory by an Aiseesoft Recording app that failed to save to disk that I'm trying to rescue. Where can I find that file so I can save/move it?

When I try to do a calculation that needs to allocate and use 128 GB of memory (it is a command line program written in C), the kernel kills my process with extreme prejudice. This console log entry is an example of one instance: > 9/25/15 7:08:40.000 PM kernel: low swap: killing pid 6202 (huffgrp) The calculation works fine and in a reasonable amount of time when it allocates and uses 64 GB of memory. My machine has 32 GB of RAM and beaucoup space on the hard drive. I also tried this on another machine with 8 GB of RAM, on which the 64 GB calculation runs fine as well, taking longer of course, but the 128 GB calculation gets killed by the kernel in the same way. On both I am running Yosemite 10.10.5. By the way, malloc() never returns an error, no matter how much space I ask for. The kernel will only kill the process once too much of that memory is actually being used by the process, resulting in lots of swapping to the hard drive. So there appears to be a secret swap space limit somewhere between 64 GB and 128 GB. My question is: how do I reconfigure the kernel to permit more swap space? I found a promising looking file, /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist, but I don't see the secret number in there. The man page for dynamic_pager says that all it does is set the name and location of the swap files. There is an older version of the same man page that documents a -S option to set the size of the swapfiles created. I tried that, requesting 160 GB swapfiles, but it had no effect. The swapfiles were still 1 GB each, and the process was still killed by the kernel.

I came across a thread about installing an SSD drive in MacBook Pro. Someone in the comments also recommended to disable the swap file but didn't say why: sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist sudo rm /private/var/vm/swapfile* I wonder why one would want to disable the swap file in Mac OS X. Does it increase performance? Stability? Any downsides? Finally, does it make any sense to disable swap file when *not* using SSD?

I recently started running into a lot of memory issues on my mac running High Sierra. Rather than the force quit window coming up, my system would freeze completely and the only way to recover is to force a reboot. After some investigating, I found out that my system is not creating any swap files even when the memory pressure is critical. There is nothing in the /private/var/vm/ directory. I have already tried sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist. Is there any other way to enable swapping? Or to run some diagnostics? **Additional details:** I am booting from an external Thunderbolt SSD (I don't know if this is the cause). Below is the output from vm_stat. If I do anything memory intensive at this stage, my system will freeze. Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes) Pages free: 4116. Pages active: 854231. Pages inactive: 825841. Pages speculative: 27754. Pages throttled: 0. Pages wired down: 606483. Pages purgeable: 22070. “Translation faults”: 75731290. Pages copy-on-write: 401121. Pages zero filled: 49766457. Pages reactivated: 17690835. Pages purged: 1577284. File-backed pages: 503400. Anonymous pages: 1204426. Pages stored in compressor: 6563399. Pages occupied by compressor: 1875311. Decompressions: 21012443. Compressions: 32102441. Pageins: 2172708. Pageouts: 35123. Swapins: 0. Swapouts: 0. **Edit:** Some more details: This is the output from diskutil ap list APFS Container (1 found) | +-- Container disk4 6BE5FDB5-A68F-4CBF-A404-68AE73E61C10 ==================================================== APFS Container Reference: disk4 Capacity Ceiling (Size): 499898105856 B (499.9 GB) Capacity In Use By Volumes: 452259872768 B (452.3 GB) (90.5% used) Capacity Available: 47638233088 B (47.6 GB) (9.5% free) | +- Volume disk4s1 99688E85-E9EF-3688-A324-913D00FF6A0E | --------------------------------------------------- | APFS Volume Disk (Role): disk4s1 (No specific role) | Name: System (Case-insensitive) | Mount Point: / | Capacity Consumed: 449420767232 B (449.4 GB) | FileVault: No | +-> Volume disk4s2 729366E4-48AA-45A3-95DA-8871B8A29778 | --------------------------------------------------- | APFS Volume Disk (Role): disk4s2 (Preboot) | Name: Preboot (Case-insensitive) | Mount Point: Not Mounted | Capacity Consumed: 20357120 B (20.4 MB) | FileVault: No | +-> Volume disk4s3 431C0191-2B1F-480C-94D0-AF4748E6D213 | --------------------------------------------------- | APFS Volume Disk (Role): disk4s3 (Recovery) | Name: Recovery (Case-insensitive) | Mount Point: Not Mounted | Capacity Consumed: 509820928 B (509.8 MB) | FileVault: No | +-> Volume disk4s4 5DE0EA6B-CA57-4226-B038-2E256FCC5B98 --------------------------------------------------- APFS Volume Disk (Role): disk4s4 (VM) Name: VM (Case-insensitive) Mount Point: Not Mounted Capacity Consumed: 2147504128 B (2.1 GB) FileVault: No And the output from mount: /dev/disk4s1 on / (apfs, local, journaled) devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse) /dev/disk2 on /Volumes/Storage (hfs, local, journaled) map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse) map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse) **Solution (Updated):** A number of good solutions suggested. After revisiting the issue again, I would recommend lint's solution below. It's the most general way that accounts for changes in volume names.

I have a 100 GB SSD that has filled up. I moved /Applications to a separate (non-SSD) drive using ditto. The system is much slower including booting up. Does the bootup process use executables in /Applications? **Finder** is also slower; Finder is not in /Applications. Spotlight is far slower. Can it be forced to reindex the files? In short what folder or files can be safely or intelligently moved off the boot drive? And secondly off the boot drive onto a slower drive of the following: /Applications /Library /Users I thought of splitting up /Applications into Mac/System one and downloaded applications. Is it sensible to move the /Users directory onto the external drive in order to separate it from system files and folders? And finally, is rsync or ditto any better for moving?

I have a 10 core M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage, on Ventura 13.0. It seems to suffer from excessive SSD writes for no apparent reason, a situation that seems very similar to what multiple users described soon after the M1 chips came out, for example here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252532855 Smartctl report: === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 34 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 266,856,852 [136 TB] Data Units Written: 132,865,271 [68.0 TB] Host Read Commands: 3,388,169,733 Host Write Commands: 847,144,045 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 143 Power On Hours: 841 Unsafe Shutdowns: 7 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 Various articles mention that the SMART reporting might not be accurate. So I also looked things up in Activity monitor, which seems to match the SMART data pretty well in my case: This is over a 11.5 hour period, so almost 4.5 GB written per hour, and the laptop spent at least 2 hours idle in screen saver mode during this time, with light browsing, youtube and video calls in the others. I have an external monitor connected. From what I read, the kernel_task bytes written seems to be what the OS writes to swap. Regardless, that's 19.33 GB that I cannot account for. I have a lot of chrome tabs (30-40) open, but only 4-5 that I often switch between. I also have some messenger apps open and some coding editors. There are no noticeable slowdowns that would indicate low memory and Activity Manager doesn't suggest this might be the case either: It's interesting to me that the Swap Used field here does not correspond at all to how much kernel_task has written. Some sort of error in reporting, or just a lot of things getting deleted from swap and others written, while maintaining the count around the 3.6 GB shown here? It's around this value all the time when I check. All this is similar to what people were describing previously, before a patch supposedly addressed this sometime back in Big Sur. While I'm not noticing any slowdowns and everything seems fine, this SSD usage is a lot higher than I've ever seen. - Is this normal? - Can I realistically do anything to reduce the amount of data written to swap / by kernel_task?

I already know Google Chrome was using a lot of memory for a badly behaving webpage. The issue was I don't know which webpage was doing that. Sometimes after a day or two, possibly some webpage on Google Chrome might be using a lot of memory. * Some webpage might not be intentionally broken or harmful but it could be the analytics or the ad system having a lot of memory leaks in their code * Eventually, the Macbook swaps memory to disk and if unchecked, complaints of hard disk space running low arrive. Using trail-and-error, if I close all tab and wait 2 - 3 minutes or quit entirely, then the hard drive all of a sudden gains back 2GB. Is there a way to hunt down which webpage is eating up so much memory, other than by trail-and-error?

After a fresh restart, everything is smooth. During the next couple of days of regular usage of the system, a problem of responsiveness gradually increases, until you can count a full second between you swiping a desktop and the system actually responding to the gesture. I've tried reducing memory pressure by closing high memory apps, but it doesn't help at all. Video demonstration here .

when I run vmmap for a process the regions start with the __TEXT entry rather than __PAGEZERO as in [sample output at documentation]( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/Articles/VMPages.html) otool -l also shows

Load command 0
      cmd LC_SEGMENT_64
  cmdsize 72
  segname __PAGEZERO
   vmaddr 0x0000000000000000
   vmsize 0x0000000100000000
  fileoff 0
 filesize 0
  maxprot 0x00000000
 initprot 0x00000000
   nsects 0
    flags 0x0

uname -mrsvp output is:

Darwin 21.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 21.2.0: Sun Nov 28 20:28:54 PST 2021; root:xnu-8019.61.5~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64 i386

Why is it so?

I'm using Docker desktop on Monterey, on an M1 Mac. Some commands in an Ubuntu-based container are running out of memory and getting killed by the system. I opened a second terminal window and launched top, and I can see the container running out of memory, then out of swap, and then the command gets killed. I've already maxed out the Docker desktop settings at 16GB RAM and 4GB of swap. I'm happy to give it more swap space but the sliders don't go any farther to the right. Is there any way to let it use more of either of these? Additional: It seems like the limits in Docker desktop override command-line args. Attempting different limits, like docker run --rm -it --platform linux/amd64 --memory-swap 32G --memory 16G ubuntu, has no effect on the limits the container actually gets.