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I run several virtual machines on my 8 GB MBP and I have never seen swap issues. Are you sure your problems are actually caused by swap?

"purge" doesn't touch swap, it discards disk cache. Its use (according to the man page) is to simulate cold boot disk performance. The command has no use for memory management, because disk cache is automatically discarded when free memory runs out.

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Fairly sure, I've been suffering with this on 10.7 and 10.8 on different machines. Some more info here:

http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de...

I second this. It's a big enough issue for me that if Mavericks doesn't fix it, I'll be switching back to Linux.

On my previous '09 MBP with a 5400rpm drive disabling the pager meant it went from a really slow crappy experience to amazingly fast. I had periodic hangs when I used too much memory, but I would put up with those to have general performance not suck.

I eventually bought a 2012 Air (got sick of carting a 17" laptop around) and so haven't seen any issues (yay for ssd!).

Looking forward to seeing if this is fixed - I've always found page management decisions made by OSX to be less awesome than linux.

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