Does OS X Mountain Lion have a built-in virtual memory limit (and how can I get rid of it)?

Does OS X Mountain Lion have a built-in virtual memory limit? I have a MacbookPro with 16GB RAM and 400GB free HD space, running latest Mountain Lion.

I am trying to load a very large (~100GB) dataset into STATA (statistical analysis software) but keep getting the message "Your Mac OS X startup disk has no more space available for application memory".

When this error occurs, my HD has ~340GB free, suggesting virtual memory has taken up 60GB of drive space. Yet there is still another 340GB of space available, so I cannot understand why VM is not making use of the free HD space.

Does VM max out at e.g. 60GB, or perhaps at a certain multiple of installed RAM? Is there anything I can do about these limits?

Any insight into the nature of the problem -- or, better still, a solution -- would be very appreciated.

Thanks

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 8, 2013 3:46 AM

18 replies

Jun 2, 2013 2:00 AM in response to Linc Davis

Putting limits on the amount of virtual memory you can have is about the stupidest thing i've seen apple do

It is a gigantic spit in the face to power users. It's my own business if I want to run a program with a massive memory footprint and fill the hard disk with swap files. There is no legitimate reason to limit my ability to do so

If I don't see this behavior go away by the next upgrade cycle for my systems, I will be leaving apple for the greener fields of debian stable

Right now i'm running encoding jobs, browsing the web with about 17 tabs, running a BT client, and watching some vids, and I get this stupid warning once every 20 minutes while I have hundreds of gigs free on disk and 8 gigs free on physical memory.

There's a reason I don't buy tablets, I want to have the FULL CAPACITY of a PC at my disposal. If they can't stop limiting my experience based on their petty assumptions, I will go to another platform.

Jun 2, 2013 3:41 AM in response to Alexander Wehr

If you want to turn off VM you can buy the Cocktail app (or try the trail version) which allows you turn off VM swapping.

Read the warning ⬆.

etresoft

Level 9

58,814 points

Jun 2, 2013 4:37 AM in response to Alexander Wehr

You and your free movie downloads would probably be happier with Linux. However, the error you are encountering is simply due to poor memory management by applications. The kernel runs happily with only a few megabytes of free RAM.

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Does OS X Mountain Lion have a built-in virtual memory limit (and how can I get rid of it)?