OT: Virtual Memory for OS X

[elpadrino87]

As the title asks, is Virtual memory still available in OS 10.2, or OS X for that matter? I tried looking in the help viewer, and checked out Apple's support, but no dice. I'm guessing that there isn't, but if there is, could someone tell me where it is?

 

[Trabpukcip]

It's always on... and to my knowledge apple didn't made anything to turn it off... so if you have a big hard drive, you virtually have all the memory you need!

 

[elpadrino87]

Hmm, that's nice, very nice indeed...
Too bad that my hard drive is gonna be filled up to the brim with AIFF files once my brother gets his vacation from work, since he's stuck with an old powerbook that can only run 8.6. But I've caught him eyeing the new iMac at apple every now and then.

 

[lateralis]

the way memory is handled is completely different in mac osX. All memory is automatically handled by the system and paged out to disk as needed. That's why you cannot manually select memory ammounts with the get info window and why there is no way to turn off virtual memory.

lateralis

 

[Mavfin]

Yes, it's different in OS X. X is a BSD (Unix) kernel with a big custom (Mac) GUI attached, so, under the hood, things are quite a bit different.