How to stop swap process in OS X?

Question

How would I prevent OS X even looking for a swap file?

I killed the swap file on my MBP. This is dead easy: just change the default swap file location so the system can't find it (goto /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist, change the last <string> in the ProgramArguments section.)

This achieves what I wanted it to achieve. My swap file is always 0mb and hence I can leave my mac on for weeks without the crippling swap-induced slowdown I came to loathe.

The question is, how can I stop the system looking for the swap file? The swap is never created because the path specified in the .plist file doesn't exist. But the system still looks for it, meaning a background process every 10 seconds, which looks like this:

dynamic_pager: cannot open swap directory /your/fake/directory/here
(com.apple.dynamic_pager[123]) Exited with exit code: 1
(com.apple.dynamic_pager) Throttling respawn: Will restart in 10 seconds

I want to stop this from happening, so my machine isn't constantly seeking something that isn't there, and to placate my innate OCD nature (as far as I can tell, this isn't using any real footprint).

Does anyone know how?!

Answer 1

If the .plist file does nothing else but call that program you can delete* it and/or unload it using

launchctl unload -w com.apple.dynamic_pager

*Move it somewhere else. Just in case.

Answer 2

According to http://www.willreese.com/?p=29 :

Disable:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
sudo rm /private/var/vm/swapfile*

Re-enable:

sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

However, to be clear, there is no "swap process" in OS X. These commands will disable and enable the pager process, which will increase the size of available swap. By disabling this process and restarting, you assure that the swap file size is always 0, effectively disabling swap on your system, since the system won't have any swap space available for use...

Answer 3

If you are interested in tweaking how the system handles swap-files you may look into hacking dynamicpager. This will basically keep a dynamic_pager process running, but it can be hacked to not use any swap, or only use a very small amount of swap.