It is possible to keep your mac beachballing if you totally disable the swap (by modifying dynamic_pager, the process who is responsible for allocating the swap) but this is a bit dangerous. OS X VM has been designed as if memory were unlimited, disabling the swap will resolve beachballing but if your applications requires more ram than actually present on your system, the system will hang. (mac os doesn’t know how to say to an app: “no there is no memory anymore” so it will wait for free memory indefinitely…)

I experienced strong pageout issue with process requiring a lot of memory I/O and disk I/O (eclipse, subversion when the tree is a big, copying a bunch of big files to the disk such as pictures from camera, lightroom…).

To conclude: mac os x sucks a lot if you need more than the half of the memory present on your system or if you need to do a lot of I/O operations.

Open source is great only because its free – it is inferior in all other regards and that is to be expected if you understand that money translates into time, effort and expertise being allocated to making something the best it can be. Why not pay people what they justly deserve for delivering outstanding work? Work that improves quality of life (for programmers that is) and gives us peace of mind. I have never once experienced the frustrations and disappointments in Objective-C and Cocoa that I used to on a nearly daily basis with open source. Although you finally get the job done its how you get it done that makes the difference. I can finish an objective-c project with a smile on my face but the same project in Java makes me want to find the authors of some of these components and classes and just ask them what the hell they were smoking at the time – or just suggest they get another day job or a different hobby. I can’t say the same about Cocoa and Objective-C. I know it was written by veteran software engineers so if I do find something wrong its going to be something small and insignificant – so far I’m happy – I’ve been happy for over a year now and thats a record no Java worshipper can beat. I’d like to have liked Java – hell I spent a great deal of money and time hoping to become an “expert” but I’ve just been disappointed too many times.

I’m having the same issues and figured that I would just put a hammer through my monitor. The JVM & Kernel quickly stopped bickering and started bi-lateral communications with all parties involved.