scott wrote:
>>  Have you ever heard of the concept of disk caches? You can even 
>> configure
>> how much is cached.
> 
> Isn't Vista's SuperFetch just a very clever disk cache that uses more 
> RAM than its predecessors?

Sort of. It's more like a cache prefetch/readahead, based on the paging 
behavior of previous runs of the same program. Plus, if a program gets 
swapped out by something, when that new something exits, the old program 
gets swapped back in preemptively rather than on demand, making the system 
more responsive.

> Really, what is the disadvantage with keeping as much stuff from disk in 
> RAM as possible?  It just seems silly to me to erase stuff from RAM for 
> the sole reason of making the "free RAM" counter higher, why not just 
> erase it later when that RAM is actually needed by something else?

I think you're talking past each other. Scott is saying the kernel uses up 
all free RAM as disk buffers. Warp is saying "why would you want the kernel 
to use up all memory?" Clearly using it as a resizable cache is a good idea, 
while using all memory for something the kernel cannot discard when needed 
is a bad idea.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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