On my macbook pro, I've disabled the dynamic_pager, and performance has improved a lot. I did it by running this
sudo launchtl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist
The downside is that if I ever use more than 4GB of memory, my machine crashes. I keep the activity monitor memory usage icon open at all times to keep an eye on this. However, once in a while a process (usually Firefox/Firebug) will rapidly eat up all my memory (within a few seconds) and my machine will crash.
Is there any way to keep an automated watch on how much memory an application is using and force kill it immediately if it goes above a threshold?
Thanks for your help.
