For my own edification and for your own education, I will explain why what you are saying is wrong.
Let's start with the most basic things. Visual Studio says it need between 96 and 192MB of RAM depending on the operating system. That's 1/4 - 1/2 of what Eclipse uses under normal conditions. I dont know the reason for the discrepancy, but if you are going to quote numbers, quote them all. I dont know what the published "minimum requirements" are for Eclipse (if they exists), but they should be at least 512MB (if Visual Studio is 192, i'd say 1GB) for Eclipse alone in addition to whatever you need for everything else. Total RAM: While the amount of memory your computer needs is not the amount that will stop paging altogether, it does not mean that the total amount of memory an individual application is using is anything other than RAM + VM. Windows (and I imagine linux as well) pages data to the swap file even if you have 4GB of unused memory. Maybe this is a flaw in Windows. Maybe not. The point is, everything that the app has in memory is either in RAM or VM. What the article that was linked to says is: if you dont see a lot of data being pulled from the swap file, then chances are good that windows has enough memory to keep the data it needs resident in the RAM in order to run efficiently. When an application loads things into memory, it does not direct the OS on what to page (send to Virtual Memory) and what not to. The OS does that based on how recent/often the memory was accessed. The reason apps use a great deal of memory is because they load all sorts of crap at startup that they dont need (instead of proactively loading them when neeed - MS Office addressed this issue back in Office 97). Winamp will load the visualization libraries that you dont run when it starts. It will never access them and as the OS is trying to be frugal with the RAM it gives out (even if it has plenty of free RAM), it will swap out RAM that isnt accessed, which leaves you with a 70MB total footprint for winamp (though you are really only using 25MB of it) or 100MB+ total footprint for AIM5 or above (which loads all the video sharing technology at load time even if you dont have a camera or ever use it). Applications are built in such a way that they assume that all the RAM in the world is available to them and they dont need to bother writing efficient code. How a simple chat application uses 100MB+ of total memory is beyond me, but look at your machine and you will see that I am right. Since the application has no knowledge of what is in RAM and what is in VM (the OS takes care of that), the total memory as far as an app is concerned is RAM + VM. That's what it has opened since load time. Before you tell me that its impossible to write an efficient app as far as total memory goes, grab a copy of uTorrent and check out its RAM usage. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Macromedia ColdFusion MX7 Upgrade to MX7 & experience time-saving features, more productivity. http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion?sdid=RVJW Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:282199 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
