Re: Question of philosophy (OT?)

["Patrick Giagnocavo +1.717.201.3366" <patrick_(_at_)_zill_(_dot_)_net>]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2004 at 08:14:02PM -0400, Ted Unangst wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Chris Zakelj wrote:
> 
> > One of the things I've noticed in my use of *NIX (whether it be BSD or 
> > Linux) versus any version of windows is how memory and swap are 
> > handled.  In the i386 nix world, I've never see swap touched unless 
> > absolutely necessary (like trying to compile a kernel+userland on i486), 
> > while windows is constantly swapping stuff out to disk, even when 
> > there's still well over half the physical memory still free.

> windows is guessing that you're not going to use a certain program (or 
> rather, some of its memory) for a while, and swaps it so it can make more 
> RAM available for disk cache.  openbsd currently has a cache limit, that 

My take on it is that there is so much dynamic memory allocation ( I
mean: short term allocation of chunks large and small, on a continuous
basis) going on that Windows assumes that the app itself will want
huge chunks of RAM.  A quick look at the process watcher app (Task
Manager?) wil show that.

--Patrick