run-away swap memory

First reation is a memory leak by something.

Might try doing a top command in terminal to see if you can spot anything (gives more info that Activity Monitor)

What's that process at the top of the list (HP Device Mo...)?

FWIW, top trucatates its output to the terminal window width. So if you make the width, say 200, you'll get some additional info like PAGEIN (page ins per process).

@Chris From Caledon

I seem to have a similar problem, and suspect HP Dev Mo

Did you resolve this?

This is an on-going and serious OS X bug. It is NOT confined to Lion, although that may have made it worse for some people. I experienced ths problem with Snow Leopard as well.

The problem is not with any particular apps, although it may start there. You can shut everything down on the system, and the swap will still not be freed. That's an OS X problem, because the processes that generated any memory leak have gone away, but OS X doesn't want to know.

The other symptom you will see is that the system will slow down dramatically, because activitymonitord is chewing up increasing percentages of CPU. I have seen activitymonitord running at over 40% of a CPU. That's impressive, and that was on Snow Leopard.

Apple needs to fix this, but they don't seem to be interested.

Those HP drivers are NOTORIOUS for memory leak issues. And your screen shot indicates that they are using a huge amount of real and virtual memory!!!

I reccomend you uninstall those since they aren't needed (use HP's instructions for removing them), and use Apple's native drivers.

Keep Spotlight (mds) -- which is often useless anyway -- disabled and get EasyFind instead.

http://www.devontechnologies.com/products/freeware/

You can kill off HPIO Trap Monitor from Activity Monitor, at least until the next reboot.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

You could temporarily move

/Library/Printers/hp/hpio/HPIO Trap Monitor.app

To the Trash and see what effect it has, if any. Or, just zip (compress) it in order to save it first before trashing.

From the Trash, can always use File>Put Back if needed.

I have those stock files in /Library/Printers, but the HP software for my specific printer is installed in my home folder ~/Library/Printers and my suppositon is that the one in /Library/Printers may not be used at all.

EDIT: first try killing it in Activity Monitor and then test to see if printing still works properly. If so, trash it.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

On second thought, don't zip it. Zipping it will create a file on the Desktop and the Permissions will be changed, incorrectly.

Haven't test all functions, but I just killed HPIO Trap Monitor and my printing appears to work just fine without it.

Message was edited by: WZZZ

10.7 won't fix the problem; it will probably be worse. As I keep saying, this is an OSX memory management bug. Some fanboy will pop up and tell you "No, no, no, St. Steve can do no wrong, and he is watching from beyond the grave," but that doesn't change the fact that the handling of swap in recent OSXs is total, complete and utter crap.

Some such fanboy assured me and others that he had no problems at all - on his 16Gb Mac. Funny that. This problem only happens when you are running an application mix that regularly exceeds your available RAM, causing swap-outs (page-outs in ActivityMonitor). I have taken to being conservative about keeping big applications running. Whereas on a linux system, I would just keep things running until my swap-in time started to get painful, I now kill of applications that I know I wil need again fairly soon, rather than have the system grind to a halt.

As a result, HP Device Monitor, the bete noir of the fanboys, has been behaving itself impeccably. It has been running since the 8th July (today is the 22nd, and my uptime is 20 days, 21:31), has used a total of 105:24.19 (thats minutes:sec.onds) and current has 112Mb of virtual memory. So where's the problem with HP Device Monitor?

I know this is a year past. But I've got to rant somewhere and this place is as good as any as Apple is not going to listen anyway.

I think what Apple did is take a perfectly good kernel and then let their least talented programmers maintain it and now it starts to show in two essential capabilities of the OS: scheduling and virtual memory management. When I started (with 10.3 I think) I worked on a 1 Gig PPC (single core) and did essentially the same thing I do now: compile stuff. And while I did that I could read mail and do research on the internet. Now I do the same on a 8 Gig DualCore and I don't dare to run more than one compiler at once because the machine will get slow ... an generate ridicolous amounts of swap-space.

Concerning the theory memory leak above:

- Currently the process with the most memory is kernel_task. Next is WebProcess. If there is a memory leak it is courtesy of Apple

- I work on Linux-machines with similar workloads and never have that kind of problems. A memory hog is a memory hog. But once it stops a good operating system is able to reclaim all the memory

Part of the problem is in my opinion the dynamically allocated swap-files. I think they are a marketing decision: "We only got a 64Gig SSD in the MB Air. If we set aside a 8Gig fixed swap-partition people are getting angry. Lets go with dynamically allocated swap. That way it will look like he can use the whole disk when he unpacks the computer". They are allocated in 1Gig-chunks. My suspicion is that they are not freed if there is SOME memory in that chunk still used.

Anyway. Sorry to bother you all. Wanted to get this of my chest SOMEWHERE and don't feel like starting a Blog "Is the Mac OS X kernel maintained by interns?". When asked "Why aren't you using a Linux-laptop" I used to say "I want a Unix but I don't want to deal with driver issues" but I'm not sure whether this argument is still valid