I have been doing a lot of research about various products in the last few weeks, and had about 60 browser windows open. I had not restarted since December 20, 2010. Using the Finder’s Go To Folder feature, and pasting this pathname in the dialog box:
/private/var/vm
I found that I had ten (!) swapfiles, despite having 8 GB of RAM in my new iMac 27 inch (mid 2010). It appears that just using the Info box to see how large a swapfile is affects its modification date, so if you want to see when your swapfiles were last updated, try Terminal instead. (If that is not the case, then I suspect that the swapfiles were modified because I copied the URL for each open broswer window.)
Here is what I found. I noticed that browser windows such as the one in which I am typing now were starting to have a noticable pause before new characters appeared as I typed:
Swapfile progression (dates show creation and modification times):
swapfile0 67.1 MB on disk 12/20/10 4:22 PM 1/5/11 12:12 AM
swapfile1 67.1 MB on disk 12/25/10 12:05 PM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile2 134.2 MB on disk 1/2/11 5:59 PM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile3 268.4 MB on disk 1/4/11 10:27 AM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile4 536.9 MB on disk 1/4/11 12:19 PM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile5 1.07 GB on disk 1/4/11 4:16 PM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile6 1.07 GB on disk 1/4/11 8:50 PM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile7 1.07 GB on disk 1/10/11 10:11 PM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile8 1.07 GB on disk Yesterday 5:28 PM Today 1:12 PM
swapfile9 1.07 GB on disk Today 11:41 AM Today 1:12 PM
Closing all browser windows (about 30 each for Firefox and Safari) caused swapfile8 and swapfile9 to be deleted. I installed the Mac OS X 10.6.6 Combo Updater after a restart, and typing is now normal.
