Comment by beckler

Not OP, but I'll post what I've found:

  > vm_stat
  Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes) 
  Pages free:                               28209.
  Pages active:                            114788.
  Pages inactive:                          111624.
  Pages speculative:                         1301.
  Pages throttled:                              0.
  Pages wired down:                         99067.
  Pages purgeable:                          11340.
  "Translation faults":                 340573628.
  Pages copy-on-write:                    8586888.
  Pages zero filled:                    184635739.
  Pages reactivated:                     62859723.
  Pages purged:                          12373577.
  File-backed pages:                        88759.
  Anonymous pages:                         138954.
  Pages stored in compressor:              645107.
  Pages occupied by compressor:            127459.
  Decompressions:                        62433647.
  Compressions:                          82841473.
  Pageins:                               10295559.
  Pageouts:                                177162.
  Swapins:                               16692043.
  Swapouts:                              17670838.

  > top -o faults
  PID    COMMAND      %CPU TIME     #TH    #WQ  #PORT MEM    PURG   CMPRS  PGRP  PPID  STATE    BOOSTS           %CPU_ME %CPU_OTHRS UID  FAULTS    COW     MSGSENT    MSGRECV    SYSBSD     SYSMACH
  533    WindowServer 10.5 06:21:59 21     5    2792- 876M-  209M+  298M   533   1     sleeping *0[1]            0.17876 1.03550    88   24771383+ 131690  354813610+ 136121938+ 237020876+ 554000668+
  2862   Safari       0.0  62:48.95 10     3    7051  480M   6400K  316M   2862  1     sleeping *0[37332]        0.00000 0.00000    501  13919243  76306   67003396   20901240   54405367+  167230473
  2883   com.apple.We 0.0  16:36.04 92     3    926   393M   384K   301M   2883  1     sleeping *19137[3734]     0.00000 0.00000    501  4032470   132     7204377    3215767    45641766+  32182159
  491    mds          0.0  11:00.86 5      2    422   66M    0B     52M    491   1     sleeping *0[1]            0.00000 0.00000    0    3296694   154     6396987    1450677    27494382   5594171
  792    mds_stores   0.0  14:00.57 4      2    93-   72M-   16K    61M    792   1     sleeping *0[1]            0.00000 0.00000    0    2786911   1956    4619344+   1304164+   15524959+  4296749+
  2694   Terminal     7.6  03:17.73 8      2    311   303M-  37M+   104M-  2694  1     sleeping *0[6352]         0.85412 0.15218    501  2034254+  338     1151091+   265791+    1517195+   269400

I'm at 1.32TB on my almost 1 month old MBA (8GB RAM/512GB DISK).