Mike wrote in message <36C4E322.CE5B2027@aol.com>...
>Problem with that is that if you run out of both, the program is forced
>to crash.


More likely, the OS will crash before the program.
99% of memory allocations assume success and continue to run
as if they did.  The first time the OS tries a malloc (probably to swap
a page back in), its all over.

>What I did on NT is set up a good permanent swap space by setting the
>min to about 200 on two drives.  It takes up space all the time, but I
>find it good to gaurentee that it will always be there.  If you set it
>too low, you could end up using up all the space on your hard drive
>without thinking about it and leave nothing for programs to deal with
>when RAM runs out.


The *best* thing you can do is to set up a fixed size swap on your
non-Windows
drive.  And make it contiguous.  So what i do when i set up a new NT box is
this:
2 drives C:Fat D:NTFS (Fat is 10% faster then NTFS, but less secure)
Barely get the box running on C:
Format D:
Set D: swap to 800MB Fixed length partition (min and max equals 800MB.
Set C: swap to 20MB (the min for BSOD stats, although i can't make that
work)
Continue with setup.

If you don't set up the fixed size swap immediately, then you lose its
contiguous benefit
and might go with the variable size one and listen to the thrashing.

If possible, put your swap on a different disk drive than
C:\WINDOZE\SYSTEM32.
M$OSes spend a lot of time reading DLLs just so they can be paged out.

[ One of the reasons Linux is faster than NT is that Linux supports proper
swap partitions
 which are *so* much faster than going all the way through the file system
to read
 pages. ]


>> >   What I don't understand is with 128 megs of ram memory on board why
would my
>> > swap file ever grow so large when the system memory is sufficient to
cover the
>> > use of the programs being run ? I know the speed increase of using ram
memory
>> > over swap file memory is significant and would prefer to run in that
environment.
>> >
>> > Anybody ?


I second the "just because".
I have 512MB on NT Workstation 4.0SP4.  After booting up, and logging in, i
am using
70MB of swap and 140MB RAM.  I run minimal services, (no Office97 fastfind,
no http server).
NT task manager is inconclusive about what is using that memory.

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