Re: [gtk-list] Re: O.S. memory usage

[Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer cs nmsu edu>]

   I've also dealt with this problem on a sun solaris machine. Sun's answer
   on this question (can't remember where i found it) : free memory is
   wasted memory. In other words ,my bother to return the freed memory to
   the OS, when changes are that the program will need to alloc memory
   later on, and thus having to ask the OS for this memory again (speeds
   things up). So giving the memory back to the OS is a waste of
   processortime.

Something that's important in understanding why this is reasonable is
to remember that unused memory is moved out to the disk.  So this
memory, which belongs to the process, isn't physical memory anyway.
-- 
Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D.       Phone -- (505) 646-1605
Department of Computer Science       FAX   -- (505) 646-1002
New Mexico State University          http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer
VL 2000 Homepage:  http://www.cs.orst.edu/~burnett/vl2000/