paul$ ls -l /var/vm
total 3670016
drwx–x–x 16 root wheel 544 Nov 14 12:00 app_profile
-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 Nov 11 18:35 swapfile0
-rw——T 1 root wheel 67108864 Nov 12 02:12 swapfile1
-rw——T 1 root wheel 134217728 Nov 12 09:04 swapfile2
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 12 12:25 swapfile3
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 12 19:04 swapfile4
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 14 12:02 swapfile5
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 14 14:23 swapfile6
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 15 11:32 swapfile7
-rw——T 1 root wheel 268435456 Nov 15 16:42 swapfile8
paul$ du -sh /var/vm
1.5G /var/vm
With only 640Mb onboard, it gets painful. Changing applications can bring up the beachball of death.
<update> But just as with OS 9 and earlier, quitting a bunch of applications and/or logging out without rebooting will force a reclamation of a lot of the swap (about 1 Gb worth, in my case). So that helps.