Reading (For Dummies)

Mac OS X annoying behavior solved (sort of)

I mostly figured out why Mac OS has been making me annoyed. It happened again tonight. My computer is out of swap. The real root of the problem must be a massive memory leak in Apple Mail, Safari, or Apple's X11 server, because over 1.5 gigs of disk was being used as swap. When OS X runs out of swap, it keeps trying to allocate more on the boot disk. If that happens to be where your accounts are stored, you are in trouble. Preferences files get ruined for open programs if you quit them and there isn't enough disk space left to write the prefs out. So once again, I lose bookmarks, preferences, mailboxes, etc. Since this is the fourth or fifth time this has happened in recent history, I'm becoming a pro at recovering. How I wish for a way to select which disk to use for swap...I have my laptop's disk partitioned into core os and media, with media having lots of free space and core os not so much. Yargh.