how do i clear the cache/delete the vm?

Lt Major Burns

"Dicky" Charlteston-Burns
after working with large amounts of large files, my VM is huge, and the machine feels slower

i have 2gb ram, but my VM is currently sitting at 15gb. i don't want to have to log out and close everything, is there a way to just clear the caches?
 
The 15GB use shouldn't be a problem.
If the total pageouts is low — ideally 0 — compared to the number of pageins after having used your Mac for hours of work you should be fine.

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/lackofram.html

My VM is at 11.5, I have 1.25GB of ram, and 'o' pageins/pageouts.
hasn't been restarted for 36 days.

To delete/clear, you need to restart

The figure of 15GB includes some items multiple times; if a shared library is used by several different applications, it will be listed the same amount of times. To tell how much VM space is actually being used, choose Go to Folder from the Finder's Go menu, enter /private/var/vm/ as the folder's path, and check the total size of the swapfiles.
 
Logging out or even just quitting all your loaded apps would probably be sufficient, but I don't think there's much else you can do. 15GB is an awful lot of VM, even though the number reported by Activity Monitor isn't really relevant. Sounds like some app is leaking memory. What are the big memory users listed in AM?

As for caches, most can be manually deleted from your Library folders at any time without causing harm. For hidden caches, I recommend a maintenance program like Onyx.
 
pmTool has been running up a lot of CPU usage (avg 45%) recently, but the big pagouts/ins were simultaneous After effects 6.5 and flash 8 usage.

also CoreAudioID is pretty much most of the time not responding.
 
Lt Major Burns said:
2.1m pageins/1.8m pageouts. it was struggling about 8 hours ago. is restart really the only way?
To get rid of the VM files, restart is all you can do, I believe. If you delete them directly, your machine will probably lock up. I tried this once before, just to see what would happen (actually, someone told me on a forum to do it), and had to power off the machine via the power button.
 
Lt Major Burns said:
pmTool has been running up a lot of CPU usage (avg 45%) recently
:confused: That is definitely odd. pmTool should never use a significant amount of processor time. It's just part of Activity Monitor. This is a sign of something strange, but...I don't know what.

also CoreAudioID is pretty much most of the time not responding.
Do you mean 'coreaudiod' (the Core Audio daemon)? If so, I think this is odd, too. I've never seen it stop responding. It might be a harmless flaw (I know iChatAgent would sometimes show "not responding" when all was well), but it might be the cause of all your problems. I'd reboot, and keep an eye on when this starts "not responding". I'm not sure if it can be safely killed on the fly. You can try it if you're daring.
 
pmtool was solved by rebooting. coreaudiod is still not responding. if i force quit, it'll restart itself, but the next time i look at activity montior, it's not responding again.
 
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