Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> As said before, the swap file is managed by the operating system. Most
> operating system memory managers can determine efficiently which blocks of
> memory to move to disk and which are needed often and therefore should stay
> in memory.

Aye, and a pity 'tis, too, considering a weird thing that just came
to light which I'm assuming (simply on general principals) is a
MS Windows thang...

I have a trace currently that exceeds my available memory considerably
during parse (from what I can see parsing seems to pull two to three
times the memory needed for the actual render itself, although it
releases the excess when finished). So anyway, it parses for a bit,
then starts to swap, then finally finishes parsing and returns a 
solid 30 megs of RAM, but get this... apparently the portion doled
to swapfile is still out there on the disk for some reason. This
conclusion I draw from the facts that A) The allocated plus free
mem exceeds what I have installed, and B) The harddrive thrashes
halfway to Montana and back when the trace finishes. 

You would think the OS is your friend. That it would say: Hey, I've
got 17 megs in swapfile, and 30 megs of physical RAM free; Wouldn't
my pal, the user, be pleased if I stuck this virtual mem back where
it belongs and boosted his performance? But alas, this doesn't
look like the case. 

What brings me to post this (unrelated to the original question)
side topic is: can those of you with experience on other platforms
tell me whether this is an inevitable consequence of virtual memory,
or just some idiotic thing that Microsoft, in their infinitessimal
wisdom didn't foresee?


Charles
-- 
http://www.enter.net/~cfusner
"...Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time,
 and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell..." 
                              -The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien

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