One of the most irritating things about OSX memory management is that it appears to swap out inactive memory well beyond the point where OSX itself begins to yell at you for low disk space. Admittedly, I need to free up some disk space, but it's irritating that by rebooting (which I'm assuming is equivalent to purging) I can go from 500mb free to 9gb - and then back within a day.
4GB installed. I looked at /var/vm/sleepimage before and after a reboot and it was 4GB in both cases (at least according to ls). The variation in free memory is greater than the memory I have installed anyway. I didn't however realize that /var/vm existed and contains pointers to the other swapfiles that I can monitor to see how they change. Thanks for the tip!
