How to Increase SWAP memory in MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014)

What you have described is common when people add unneeded third-party utilities. Anti-virus/security packages, so-called "cleaning/optimizing/tuneup" apps, and peer-to-peer software can create problems not experienced by "normal" OSX installs. They are pushed at people switching from Windows who have been brainwashed into believing that no computer can run at all with steaming piles of useless utilities.

Other problem children are third-party disk backup software that is usually bundled with an external hard drive, online backup schemes, and some security programs for online banking.

That is why EtreCheck was suggested. It gives us a snapshot of your config without giving any any personal data.

Memory management is automatic and non-user-adjustable in OS X. It will swap when it finally needs to. And with 16GB, that will be very seldom. Let the system do its thing, worry about whatever productive (or improductive) activities you want to do with your applications on the Mac.

In a recent update, OSX changed how its memory is managed to be proportional to the amount that you have in order to increase speed. This makes it look like the OS is using alot of ram at all times, but if you were to start a RAM intensive process, it would switch the RAM to that process. Thus, there's nothing to worry about, and increasing SWAP memory would make your computer slower.

What applications are you running that do not release memory back to the operating system when they are quit? Clicking the red traffic light on an application may not always quit the application, and thus it remains memory resident. Every browser tab that you leave open is a separate, memory consuming process.

Use the Launchpad : Other : Activity Monitor : Memory tab to assess your memory pressure. If it is in the red, what applications are running at that time, and do they need too?

trymecisco wrote:

How to Increase/configure SWAP memory in MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 OS X Yosemite 10.10.5. As my main memory usage keep increasing without doing any heavy task. I want to create swap memory to get ride of this.

The etrecheck is recommended by a number of top posters here in order to see what is going on. If you see killed applications you have too many things open that are not doing anything. Don't know about Yosemite and above - but prior to that apple swap memory was pretty much the empty space on your disk drive

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Yosemite and above puts your entire application into RAM - unlike earlier releases where it put some in VM (pages in) if you see pages out swapping is occurring.

In order to keep active applications in RAM (those that have activity) Yosemite may compress parts of memory -- if its still not enough for active processes it Kills processes that have had no activity in a certain amount of time, only as a last resort will it swap active processes to VM.

I see 2 downsides to Yosemite & above: First Killing processes: Some applications may crash because the caller of a process opens it with initialization of some field then tries to call the same application after it has been killed - but is assuming it is running. Second: Compress of Memory - compression of information has one quick - very rare - the data compresses into an instruction that signifies end of data when it really isn't. Both problems would not occur if you have enough ram to run everything you have open.

trymecisco wrote:

Thanks VikingOSX

yesterday i was installing Windows Server 2012 R2 on VMware Fusion with 2 Gb of Ram, The Fan started with very high speed. when i checked i found that it was utilising 15.5 Gb of memory, i want to know, means whenever we install an application the system first stored the application in the RAM and then it starts installing the application.

Currently i has only opened the safari and my system is consuming 7.32 Gb of RAM is it OK or i have to check something,

kindly suggest me i have create swap memory so that my system should use swap memory instead of main memory. as i check i found that there is no swap memory in my system.

vm.swapusage: total = 0.00M used = 0.00M free = 0.00M (encrypted)

2 GB RAM is not enough RAM to allocate to Fusion running Windows Server. Try allocating 8 GB RAM. With respect to increasing swap, ensure you have enough free drive space to handle swap etc.

Unless you have a program with a profound memory leak it isn’t necessary for you to “free up” memory. The OS does that for you. You bought a 16GB computer so let the computer use it all.

You mention running VMWare which is a very high resource application and Safari at the same time. One thing lots of people fail to take into consideration with Safari is that to make the program more robust Apple allocates memory to Safari for every tab and window you open. It is very easy for Safari to grab a huge amount of memory if you, like me, keep a lot of tabs open at once.

Once your computer needs swap memory (when you are trying to use more memory resources than the computer has) a swap file will be created. Until then real RAM is used - which is as it should be. You are over thinking - just use the computer.

OSX is not Windows or Linux so comparing their use of swap is of little value. With either system you want to use swap as little as possible. Both systems use RAM first. Hard drive swap space access is much much slower than using all your RAM first.

Actually you arent creating swap memory manually you are allocating drive space for the swap files. The OS will use that space, or not, as it is required. The Mac operates differently as BobTheFisherman points out.

You have to increase the amount of RAM Fusion allocates to running its virtual machines. 2GB is absolutely minimum for running desktop Windows 7 let alone Windows Server or then running anything in the Windows Server like SQL Server, iiS, Visual Studio, etc. If you are not running any OSX apps at the same time as running Fusion I suggest increasing allocated Fusion RAM to 12GB.