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Would this also make a difference on a Macbook Pro? It seems that it should... When I look in my /var/vm I also have a collection of incremental swapfiles in there.

I also get lots of slow-downs when closing apps - exacerbated by the fact that I swapped my MBP's hard drive for a 5'400rpm, bigger one, which means disk IO is even slower. Anything that reduces disk IO would be welcome.

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If you force-quit / SIGKILL the app, it won't bother to page as much of its bullshit back into memory as it's terminating it. I'm kind of baffled by the continued presence of graceful shutdown procedures in an age when everyone does recovery on startup anyway.

The problem isn't that the 5400rpm drive is 'slower', but that the average latency is higher (though only by about 1.5x) -- it likely has higher streaming bandwidth simply by virtue of greater areal density.

By the way, Apple does just that in Snow Leopard. The processes now have a "Sudden Termination" flag, and if a program has no unsaved data and is ready to quit, it sets this flag on itself. When shutting down such a process, the system sends it SIGKILL instead of a usual SIGTERM.

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