mikeash.com: Friday Q&A 2009-06-19: Mac OS X Process Memory Statistics
http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2009-06-19-mac-os-x-process-memory-statistics.html

Welcome back to another Friday Q&A. Now that WWDC is behind us, I'm back on track to bring you more juicy highly-technical goodness. Maybe I can even get back to doing one a week.... This week I'm going to take André Pang's suggestion of discussing process memory statistics (the stuff you see in Activity Monitor or top) in Mac OS X. Memory Structure Before I can discuss what the stats mean, I first have to discuss just how memory actually works on a modern operating system. If you already know the difference between physical memory and virtual address space, understand how file mapping works, etc., then feel free to skip ahead. Ram, Memory, Activity Monitor.

Description of the memory management of OS X from the user perspective

Though machines with 4GB are not yet the typical purchase for home or business use, they are readily available from major manufacturers and it won’t be long before they are the typical purchase. But there are problems. You don’t have to stand for long in a computer shop to hear a sales assistant talk of 4GB as some sort of limit for 32-bit operating systems, and it won’t be long before this sales patter develops into outright promotion of 64-bit Windows as the only way to get past this limit. Some sense of this can be seen already in manufacturers’ advertising materials, as in the following fine print from Dell:

You probably already know this, but this page describes PAE and how a 32-bit OS can use more than 4GB of RAM (and already does - see Windows Server editions).

<DigitalKiwi> caseyd: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-swap-space.html

Linux: Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space?

a really nice article on debugging

Amazing forensic methods to compare system cache in memory with image on disk.